
Class _ 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



OF 

fttye £orfcTg draper 



BY 
WILLIAM R. RICHARDS 



PASTOK OF THE BRICK PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 
NEW YORK CITY 



PHILADELPHIA 

TTbe TKHestmfnster press 

MCMIX 






Copyright, 1909, by the Trustees of 

The Presbyterian Board of Publication and 

Sabbath-School Work 



]<©4* 


,'t-* 1 


^ 


jCla.*, 246 85 6 
J SEP 21 W09 


i i.rfi . 




«»«-— ~ 



FOREWORD 

The aim of the following study is to call at- 
tention to certain features of our Lord's teach- 
ing as exhibited in the prayer which bears his 
name. On such a theme one may hardly hope 
to say anything that has not often been said 
before, but some things are worth saying over 
and over. 

Especially tie prayer always reminds us that 
the human bro herhood into which Jesus urged 
his disciples rests on a faith in the divine father- 
hood ; and that if we want a righteous democracy 
among men we must pray for the kingdom of 

God. 

W. R. R. 

The Brick Church, New York. 
September, 1909. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction. Teach Us to Prat 9 

I. Our Father 21 

II. Hallowed Be Thy Name .. 37 

III. Thy Kingdom Comb 54 

IV. Our Daily Bread 75 

V. Forgive Us Our Debts 94 

VI. Temptation «♦ 113 

Conclusion. In His Name 131 



W&t JLqxV* draper 

yi^ur Jf atfjer tobicb art in beaben, 
\I7 ^allotoeb be tb? name. ®bP 
femgbom come. ZCfJP totU be bone 
in eartf), ad tt te m beaben. <©ibe 
u* tbte bap our bail? breab. &nb 
forgibe u* our bebt*, a* toe forgtbe 
our bebtor*. &nb ieab us; not tnto 
temptation, but beltber u* from ebtl: 
Jf or tfnne te tfje femgbom, anb tbe 
potoer, anb tbe glorp, for eber. 
amen. 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

INTRODUCTION 
Ueacb Zfts to flSrag 

"Lord, teach us to pray," said one of the 
disciples ; but was not the Lord always do- 
ing this for them 1 What was his own living 
example but one long, uninterrupted course 
of instruction in the duty and privilege of 
prayer to God? 

Those who came nearest to Jesus evi- 
dently felt that he was one who lived con- 
sciously and constantly in a divine presence. 
John the Baptist down by the Jordan bank 
seemed to see the divine Spirit, in bodily 
form like a dove, descending and abiding 
upon him. Martha said, ■ ' I know that what- 
soever thou wilt ask of God, God will give 
it thee," intimating the same sense of con- 
tinual communion. Jesus himself used to 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

speak to his disciples about his Father as 
one without whom not even a sparrow could 
fall to the ground; one, therefore, who 
could be trusted to take good care of them ; 
one who knew all their needs and could be 
trusted at all times and everywhere to keep 
them safe. To use a phrase that has grown 
dear to some of us in these later times, Jesus 
was one who had made a " practice of the 
presence of God. ' ' And the disciples knew 
this, felt it. What the old patriarch had 
once seen in his dream at night they seemed 
to behold in the waking hours of every day : 
"the heaven open, and the angels of God 
ascending and descending upon the Son 
of man. ' ' But what was all this but teach- 
ing them the very deepest part of the les- 
son of prayer? For if you have learned 
to feel God, and to trust him as one always 
near you, always looking upon you, always 
listening to you, always caring for you, the 
rest of the lesson could not be very diffi- 
cult. It is the most natural thing in the 
10 



TEACH US TO PRAY 

world to speak to your friend — when you 
have anything to say to him — if only you 
know that you have a friend and that he 
is here. 

But though Christ's whole life was thus 
a life of constant prayerfulness or com- 
munion, he also offered his disciples the 
example of setting apart particular times 
for praying. And I think there is no other 
part of our Lord's example that most of 
us need to be more careful in copying than 
this. For it has come to be the fashion 
with some 'excellent people not to think 
much of special times for prayer, but to 
insist more upon the duty of active serv- 
ice for men. To make sure of getting your 
day's work done; to spend your days go- 
ing about doing good ; to use your time to 
feed the hungry and clothe the naked and 
heal the sick — that will be to spend your 
life as Jesus Christ did, so men say — that 
will be far better than burying yourself 
uselessly in some quiet convent for undis- 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

turbed prayer to God. "To labor is to 
pray," they say; "he prayeth best who 
loveth best." And all that is very true, 
and a most important Christian truth in its 
proper place. But if we are really trying 
to learn these truths from the example of 
Jesus, then we must not forget to ask also 
where it was that he himself sought and 
found the strength that should make pos- 
sible all those days of extraordinary activ- 
ity and usefulness. And it is not difficult 
to learn where he found it if one really 
wishes to know. 

In one place in the record you will read 
how he healed a demoniac child whom his 
disciples had been laboring over in vain. 
And when they asked him afterwards why 
their own efforts had been so fruitless, 
when his were so successful, he answered, 
"This kind goeth not out but by prayer." 
And if you read back you will learn that 
he himself had, in fact, just come down 
from the Mountain of Transfiguration, and 
12 



TEACH US TO PRAY 

that he had gone up into that mount to 
pray. Now if any of us are trying to imi- 
tate Christ's life of active usefulness on 
the plain without following also the other 
part of his example when he went up into 
the mount to pray, it is likely that many 
of our efforts will be as fruitless as were 
those of these puzzled disciples. 

And this was not an isolated or peculiar 
incident. The narrative makes it clear that 
Jesus very often went away thus alone by 
himself, or with only two or three com- 
panions, to pray. It is true he was in some 
sense praying all the while and every- 
where; that is, in the sense that he lived 
constantly in the assurance of his Father's 
presence with him. But that was not 
enough for Christ. He must have times 
when he could pray and give his whole 
mind to it. It seems to have been his cus- 
tom before any great emergency to seek out 
such opportunity for undisturbed prayer 
to his Father. 

13 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

Before he picked out the twelve men who 
were to be called apostles and to work 
with him and after him in founding his 
church, we read that "he went out into a 
mountain to pray, and continued all night 
in prayer to God. " * ' When it was day, ' ' it 
says, he came down among the people and 
resumed his active work among them. 

And so afterwards, when the last great 
emergency of his life was close at hand 
and when he was about to be given into the 
power of his enemies, he sought the shaded 
solitude of the Garden of Gethsemane that 
he might pray. That one last night of his 
life may be taken as a very important part 
of the instruction that Jesus offered his 
disciples on this subject. "Lord, teach us 
to pray," was their request, and here in 
the garden he was teaching them. 

How many different bits of teaching he 
gave them on this subject during the hours 
of that one night. First, when he took the 
bread and the cup and blessed them — for 

14 



TEACH US TO PRAY 

evidently this had been his custom when- 
ever he and others were eating together. 
Whether he was feeding the five thousand 
on the hillside in Galilee, or his twelve 
friends in the upper chamber in Jerusalem, 
or just two of them in the stopping place at 
Emmaus, his custom was, as he took the 
bread, to speak his thanks to God before 
he ate it. This gesture of courtesy toward 
the divine Benefactor was so habitual with 
him that it was the first thing those two dis- 
ciples at Emmaus knew him by after he was 
risen from the grave. The Master "was 
known of them in breaking of bread." 
When we ask that "the grace of the Lord 
Jesus Christ" may be with us all, it is well 
to remember that one characteristic exhibi- 
tion of this gracious quality in him was the 
habit of saying grace before meat. 

Then, for a second word of instruction, 
Christ warned his overconfident disciple 
Peter that a sifting of temptation was 
about to fall upon them all: "But I have 

15 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

prayed for thee," he said to Peter, "that 
thy faith fail not." Those who wish the 
Lord to teach them to pray as he prayed 
must study that part of his example when 
he prayed for his friends. By all means 
manifest your friendliness by friendly 
deeds, feeding your friends when hungry, 
clothing and sheltering them when they are 
cold, and healing them when they are sick, 
for Christ's example encourages us to such 
helpful activities; but you are not follow- 
ing his example through unless you also 
pray for your friends. 

Then follows that prayer related in the 
seventeenth chapter of John, when these 
eleven friends of Jesus heard him praying 
for them all, and for all who should believe 
through their word. 

And then last of all comes the prayer 
in the Garden, when the storm broke over 
our Lord's own soul, and the bewildered 
disciples heard their Master praying for 
himself: "0 my Father, if it be possible, 

16 



TEACH US TO PRAY 

let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, 
not as I will, but as thou wilt. ' ' And then 
again the second time they heard him say, 
"0 my Father, if this cup may not pass 
away from me, except I drink it, thy will 
be done." 

On this night some of the disciples were 
near enough to overhear how he prayed for 
himself. We have no report of what he 
had said on other of those long nights of 
watching when he had been alone with God. 
We do not know how often on earlier occa- 
sions he may have felt something of the 
bitterness of the cup appointed him to 
drink, offering up his prayer and suppli- 
cation with strong crying and tears. Only 
once, on this last night of the long life 
struggle, there were witnesses near enough 
to overhear, and to tell us afterwards how 
Jesus used to pray for himself. 

So that one night, the last night of our 
Lord's earthly life, gives us from his ex- 
ample this fourfold instruction on the sub- 
17 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

ject of prayer : first, when he thanked God 
for his good gift of bread; then, when he 
prayed for his friend Peter ; then, when he 
prayed for all his friends and for others; 
then, when he prayed for himself. When 
any disciple says, "Lord, teach us to 
pray," he must be ready to take his teach- 
ing — the best kind of teaching — from the 
example of the Master when he prayed. 
No other part of our Lord's example de- 
mands a more careful study from his dis- 
ciples. It is not reasonable to suppose that 
any disciple can follow Christ successfully 
in the kind of active work that he was al- 
ways doing for men who has not also 
learned from him something of the secret 
of his strength for doing that work. 

What does any great city most need from 
the churches in it in order that the people 
may be helped as they would be helped if 
Jesus in bodily form were walking about 
the streets! Some may answer that the 
chief need is of a more generous supply of 

18 



TEACH US TO PRAY 

coats and hats and shoes, or more spacious 
orphanages and hospitals. But whenever 
the need of such purchasable commodities 
is made sufficiently evident, you hardly 
know what to do with the abundance of the 
contributions offered. 

What is needed most, and this need is 
not so quickly supplied, is that, of those 
called Christians, there should be more 
who have learned from the Master to make 
a practice of the presence of God; so that 
whenever we speak of him it shall be in the 
tone of men who know; and when a hard 
bit of work has to be done we can do it with 
the kind of strength that came to the Master 
from prayer ; and when some dark trouble 
or fierce temptation falls, staggering men's 
faith, we can meet it as he met his after 
he had watched and prayed in Gethsemane. 

That appalling disaster of a few months 
ago in southern Italy, which plunged a na- 
tion into mourning and stirred the sym- 
pathy of the world, made large claim for 

19 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

material help, and the help was promptly 
offered; but was there not, and is there 
not, still greater need throughout that 
stricken and desolate region of men and 
women who could face even such dreadful 
trouble and still cling to their trust in a 
God who loves ? Where can you learn such 
faith except from him who could look for- 
ward upon the black mystery of the cross 
itself, while his soul was in agony and his 
sweat as it were great drops of blood fall- 
ing to the ground, and still say, "Father, 
if this cup may not pass away from me, 
except I drink it, thy will be done." 

Yes, the greatest blessing that the 
churches could confer would be a supply 
of disciples who had learned from their 
Master's example how to pray. 

The following chapters attempt a brief 
study of the sentences of the Lord's Prayer, 
but the best introduction to any such study 
is to recall first the personal example of 
the Lord himself and how he prayed. 

20 



CHAPTER I 
©ur jFatbet 

We have seen in the introductory chapter 
that our Lord by his own example was al- 
ways teaching his disciples to pray; but 
when a specific request for such instruction 
came from one of the disciples, what the 
man himself intended to ask for was some 
form of words that might properly be used 
in their supplications. Such a form was 
furnished them, and from that day to this 
the disciples have loved to use it in their 
prayers to God. And we never tire of 
studying it as a model for all our praying, 
even when we might not word our requests 
according to this particular form. 

The successive chapters of this little book 
are studies of the successive petitions of 
this form of prayer which Christ taught to 
his disciples. 

21 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

"But when ye pray," he said, and as 
good old Matthew Henry says, "it is taken 
for granted that all the disciples of Christ 
pray. As soon as ever Paul was converted, 
* behold, he prayeth.' You may as soon find 
a living man that doth not breathe as a 
Christian that doth not pray." "When ye 
pray, . . . after this manner therefore pray 
ye." 

"Our Father," and that one opening 
phrase of the prayer will furnish material 
enough for this first chapter. 

May I quote here another quaint obser- 
vation from old Matthew Henry: "The 
Lord's Prayer (as indeed every prayer) 
is a letter sent from earth to heaven. Here 
is the inscription of the letter, the person 
to whom it is directed, 'Our Father'; the 
place, where, 'in heaven'; the contents of 
it, in several errands of request ; the close, 
'for thine is the kingdom'; the seal, 
'Amen'; and if you will, the date, too, 'this 
day.' " 

22 



OUR FATHER 

This chapter will be taken up with the 
inscription — the person to whom this let- 
ter is addressed, "Our Father." 

The question has been much discussed by 
students of the Bible how far the several 
phrases of this prayer were original with 
Christ; or whether he may have selected 
them from phrases already familiar to the 
Jews in their customs of worship. Some 
of them must have been familiar, for some 
evident parallels have been pointed out; 
but Canon Plumptre seems justified in say- 
ing that "these parallels do not carry us 
very far." At all events, however it be 
with the separate phrases, this Lord's 
Prayer as a whole was altogether original 
with Christ in the new spirit which breathes 
through and unifies all its sentences. Pre- 
eminently is that true of this opening 
phrase, this name for the God to whom the 
prayer is to be offered. 

The ancient Hebrews, like our own In- 
dians and other primitive peoples, made 

23 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

much of names. The names they claimed 
for themselves or gave to their children 
were always understood to mean something, 
something indicative of the character or 
circumstances of the person named. And 
so it must be with the name for God — it was 
far more than a sound; it was the dis- 
closure of God himself. To the mind of a 
devout Hebrew there could be no more 
vitally interesting religious question than, 
What is God's real name? 

We read of Jacob in that crowning spir- 
itual experience that we call his wrestling, 
that he said to the mysterious Antagonist, 
"Tell me thy name." The name was not 
told then. But we read afterwards of 
Moses, in the hour of his great experience 
by the burning bush, that he asked a similar 
question of the Presence that had been or- 
dering him to Egypt ; by what name should 
Moses speak of God to the people in Egypt ; 
and the name was told, "I am." "I am 
hath sent thee." The early patriarchs had 

24 



OUR FATHER 

known God only as the Almighty ; now it is 
the "I am," Jehovah. First came the 
thought of God as power; now the deeper 
thought of God as being. 

But Christ does not put either of those 
names at the head of his prayer; it is 
' ' Father, ' ' and our question is how far this 
title is original with Christ, how gener- 
ally this word "Father" had come into 
Jewish usage as a true name for God in 
prayer. 

Of course, you can find some hints at 
such a usage — not very many — in the books 
of our Old Testament. As where, in Deu- 
teronomy * or Isaiah 2 or Malachi, 3 the peo- 
ple are rebuked as disobedient and disre- 
spectful children. Malachi says, speaking 
for God, "If then I be a father, where is 
my honor?" Or again God is sometimes 
appealed to as the last resource of those 
who have no other, as in Isaiah 4 one is 
heard crying, "Doubtless thou art our 

1 Ch. 32 : 6. 2 Ch. 1:2. 3 Ch. 1 : 6. « Ch. 63 : 16. 
25 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

father, though Abraham be ignorant of 
us, and Israel acknowledge us not." Or 
again the psalmist cries, 5 "When my 
father and my mother forsake me, then 
the Lord will take me up." But the 
passages are not many. No such name 
would stand in their common forms of 
prayer. 

In those later Hebrew writings which we 
call the Apocrypha, these hints at a faith in 
the fatherhood of God become somewhat 
more common ; as where the son of Sirach 8 
calls God the Father and Governor of all 
his whole life, or where Tobit declares 
that "God is our Father for ever." It 
is evident that the sound of this name at 
least would not be altogether unfamiliar 
to our Lord's Jewish hearers. And, in- 
deed, heathen as well as Jews had some- 
times spoken of the divine being as a sort 
of parent to the creation : "Zeus the father 
of gods and men." But that this name 

6 Ps. 27 : 10. e Ch. 23 : 1. 
26 



OUR FATHER 

should be used as Jesus was now encourag- 
ing them to use it, used by every disciple 
at the beginning of every prayer — this was 
a religious phenomenon without precedent. 
That any one plain man in his own daily 
personal prayer should venture to say, 
"Father," as if that were name enough; 
as if that told all that we ever need to tell 
about the God whom we wish our prayer to 
reach; — there never was a more original 
contribution to human thought than when 
Jesus spoke this opening phrase in the 
prayer which he was teaching for all his 
disciples, and so for the whole world. 

But here let me recur for a moment to 
what was said in the introductory chapter, 
that our Lord did more than furnish a form 
of words for prayer, that his own example 
had been for these men one long course of 
instruction in the subject of prayer. In- 
deed if it had not been so, if this new name 
for God had been a form of words and 
nothing else, it is quite certain that the 

27 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

world would never have learned it so as to 
remember and use it. But it was very 
much more than a form; it came from a 
speaker who himself always began his 
prayers in this way. It was by his own ex- 
ample that Jesus was teaching men, and 
has taught men whenever they pray to say, 
"Father/' 

There are two peculiarities to be noticed 
in the religious situation of our time; the 
one is that to many it seems increasingly 
difficult to believe that the unseen power 
which made and rules the world can be like 
a father ; but the other peculiar fact of the 
times is that if we are to go on praying at 
all we must now believe in the fatherhood 
of him to whom we pray. 

That first difficulty of believing that God 
is like a father arises from our wider ob- 
servation of the stern facts of the universe. 
The apparent heartlessness of it weighs 
upon our souls like an intolerable burden. 
The very phrases that our later teachers 

28 



OUR FATHER 

have taught us: " natural selection," "the 
struggle for existence, " " the survival of the 
fittest" — what a hopeless, Godless sound 
they have ! Or again, when the earthquake 
swallowed up those Italian cities, how many 
were asking what father, if he had the 
power to prevent it, would have allowed 
such an immense disaster to fall on his chil- 
dren. Men never knew before, as we know 
now, how hard it must be in our moods of 
scientific observation to turn our faces 
toward the mysterious but inexorable 
power that rules the world and say, 
"Father." 

Yet that is what nearly the whole world 
is saying in its moods of prayer, so far as 
it is moved to pray at all. For in these 
days we have all come to believe that a 
being of infinite power merely, or of in- 
finite wisdom, but without the moral quali- 
ties that would allow us to trust him as a 
father, ought not to be called God, and 
would not be worthy of our prayer. Men 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

of other ages might worship their bloody 
Moloch, or Baal, or Mars, or Thor — we 
simply could not. So while it is harder 
now than ever before to believe in a 
Heavenly Father, and pray to him, yet we 
must offer our prayer to him, else we shall 
not pray. That is the twofold peculiarity 
of the present religious situation the whole 
world over. And we do pray to him. 
Every day more and more of the children 
of men are lifting up their voices in prayer 
to "our Father which art in heaven." 

The historical explanation of this 
strange religious phenomenon of our time 
is that Jesus, by the compelling power of 
his own example, has been teaching the 
world to say, "Father." For he himself 
said it ; spite of all the dark mysteries of the 
world, he said it, and he knew it. A volume 
of sermons has lately been published under 
the title ' ' The Creed of Jesus, ' ' meaning by 
that title "The Lord's Prayer," and the 
title applies with peculiar appropriateness 

30 



OUR FATHER 

to the first phrase of the prayer, ' ' Father ' ' ; 
there you have the creed of Jesus himself. 
Through the whole story of his life, from 
those early days of his childhood in the 
temple when he was about his " Father's 
business, ' ' through the scene of his baptism 
and his temptation, through the whole 
course of his teaching, in his own prayer 
in Gethsemane, and his prayer as he hung 
dying on the cross, always it was ' ' Father. ' ' 
The one event which has made the deep- 
est mark upon the history of the world is 
the birth into the world of this one child 
of our race whose one surest element of 
faith and knowledge was that the unseen 
God was his Father. That was truly the 
creed of Jesus Christ; that is why now 
nearly the whole world, if it is ever moved 
to pray at all, finds its lips shaping them- 
selves to say, " Father." Already in all 
parts of the earth you could find a fulfillment 
of what Paul wrote long ago in his letter to 
the Galatians: "Because ye are sons, God 

31 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into 
your hearts, crying, Abba, Father." Oh, 
may the Lord teach us all this lesson. For 
really I do not believe we can ever master it 
except as we learn it from him. It must be 
the spirit of God's dear Son coming into 
our hearts that should ever enable us to 
speak so daring a name, and mean it. 
Some one has well said that "this is a 
prayer that might be committed to memory 
in a few minutes; but it is the work of a 
lifetime to learn it by heart;" and what 
we want is to learn it by heart, so that we 
can mean it when we say, ' ' Father. ' ' 

' ' Father, ' ' yes, but in the prayer it is " Our 
Father, ' ' for there are other children ; and 
we are not to forget these others when we 
pray. Let me quote you a few sentences 
from a sermon preached more than fifteen 
hundred years ago in the old city of Con- 
stantinople: "Jesus teaches, moreover, to 
make our prayer common, in behalf of our 
brethren also. For he saith not 'My 

32 



OUR FATHER 

Father,' but 'Our Father,' offering up 
his supplications for the body in common, 
nowhere looking to his own, but everywhere 
to his neighbor's good; and by this he at 
once takes away hatred, and quells pride, 
and casts out envy, and brings in the mother 
of all good things, even charity, and exter- 
minates the inequality of human affairs; 
and shows how far the equality reaches be- 
tween the king and the poor man. . . . For 
to all hath he given one nobility, having 
vouchsafed to be called the Father of all 
alike." The slow passing centuries have 
taken nothing from the truth of those 
words spoken so long ago by St. Chrysos- 
tom. Jesus was laying the foundation, not 
of Christian charity alone, but of a uni- 
versal democracy, with the whole doctrine 
of freedom and equal human rights, when 
he taught us in praying to say, "Our 
Father." For if God is our Father, it 
means that we have brothers whom we 
remember in our prayer. 

33 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

The attempt has been made sometimes 
to establish a doctrine of human brother- 
hood, while forgetting or denying the divine 
fatherhood. But the success of such at- 
tempts has not been encouraging. Take, 
for instance, that great revolution of 1789 
in France. There was a land where the 
Christian religion had long been discredited 
by the corruption and greed and heartless- 
ness of its official representatives; and so, 
when the outburst came, men were impa- 
tient to have done with everything belong- 
ing to the hated church. Brothers, they 
would be to one another; but no Father, 
God; let their worship be rendered to a 
goddess of reason, or to an opera dancer, 
or to Robespierre's "Supreme Being"; to 
anything rather than the Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Almost everywhere in 
Paris you can see deeply chiseled in the 
stone the old revolutionary motto of " Lib- 
erty, equality, fraternity"; but those same 
men were preparing for 1793 and the Reign 

34 



OUR FATHER 

of Terror; and again for 1870 and the 
Commune. Historically that term brother- 
hood has now an ominous sound, unless 
there be a Father. And so any of us who 
really wish to deal fairly with our human 
brothers; who really wish to see that 
motto of liberty, equality, fraternity, 
worked out into a social order that shall 
be altogether brotherly, must pratice our 
lips and hearts over this prayer which 
Christ has taught us to our Father. For it 
was Jesus, always knowing himself the Son 
of God, who has given us also the one, the 
only, effective example of universal human 
brotherliness. 

I was talking once some years ago to a 
poor girl who had not many days to live 
and not much breath for speech, and 
whispering to me about her own weakness 
and weariness of body and of mind, she 
said that even when she tried to pray she 
could not get beyond, ' ' Our Father. ' ' The 
saying has often come to me since. If she 

35 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

had gone as far as that certainly it was a 
good prayer. And I think the Father 
could be trusted to fill in for his tired child 
all that was needed of confession, and 
thanksgiving, and request. Our Father, 



CHAPTER II 
Iballowefc 3Be TTbp fllame 

The first petition of the Lord's Prayer. 
It is to be noticed at the outset that this 
model prayer begins with requests that have 
to do with God. In this it resembles the 
commandments of the ancient Jewish law. 
For the first table of that law lays down 
the duties which a man owes to God; 
only in the second table do we come to 
the duties that he owes to his fellow-men. 
When our Lord issued his famous sum- 
mary or interpretation of the ancient 
law he followed the same order, for the 
first and great commandment was of 
love to God; and the second, which was 
like unto it, was of love to our neighbor 
man. 

So it is now in the matter of praying. 
The first three petitions have to do with 

37 



THE LORD'S PRAYER \ 

God and his glory and his kingdom, and 
after that we come to the petitions which 
express our desire for our own good as 
men. 

There are some good people in the world 
who profess great admiration for Jesus 
and his teaching and his example, but who 
quite contradict his teaching and example 
in this important particular, for what he 
placed first of all they entirely omit. They 
profess themselves eager to follow him in 
his kindness toward men, but they decline 
to listen when he speaks of reverence 
toward God. That blunder is to be avoided. 
If Jesus is worthy of any attention from 
men it is worth while that we should begin 
with him where he begins. And with him 
the beginning of all good things, whether in 
heaven or on earth, was what he called the 
glory of God, or the hallowing of God's 
name. The third commandment of the old 
law was that a man should not take God's 
name in vain ; now the first petition of the 

3S 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

new prayer is that God's name may be hal- 
lowed. 

There is a wonderful passage in one of 
F. W. Robertson's sermons in which he 
argues that "the decay in the meaning of 
words" is a certain mark of "the decay of 
national religious feeling"; that "the de- 
basement of a language is a sure mark of 
the debasement of a nation. ' ' And he adds 
that the name of God may share this fate. 
"No marvel that we are taught to pray, 
'Hallowed be thy name.' We cannot pray 
a deeper prayer for our country than to 
say, 'Never may that name in English 
stand for a lower idea than it stands for 
now.' " In offering this prayer we ask 
that we and our fellow-men may be enabled 
to keep the third commandment, that we 
may never take God's name in vain, that we 
may be saved from all flippant irreverence 
of speech. 

One would think that by this time this 
particular prayer might have been an- 

39 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

swered, this particular command might 
have been obeyed. For this sin of pro- 
fanity is so needless and objectless, so re- 
pulsive to all refined taste, so degrading 
and coarsening to the sinner. Nothing in 
the world to be gained by it, everything in 
the world to be lost by it. But the 
prayer is not yet fully answered, that com- 
mandment is not yet fully obeyed; the 
same old sin goes on, and heaven is still in- 
sulted by this harsh and monotonous chorus 
of profanity rising from every corner of 
the earth where men have taken God's 
name in vain. It still sounds like a con- 
fession of the sin of our people, perhaps 
our own, as often as we pray, "Hallowed 
be thy name." 

But you notice the petition in the prayer 
takes a positive form, while the language 
of the older commandment was negative. 
"Thou shalt not," said the law, and a man 
might have flattered himself that he was 
secure against breaking the commandment 

40 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

if only he was careful enough never to 
speak the name of God at all. And per- 
haps that is as far as some of us have ad- 
vanced in our practice of reverence in our 
common conversation; for fear of swear- 
ing we have left the name of God severely 
alone. 

But evidently, even if that was obeying 
the commandment, it would be no true an- 
swer to the request in the Lord's Prayer. 
"Hallowing God's name" cannot mean the 
same thing as burying it in oblivion. For 
remember what this latest and dearest name 
of God is, as Christ has just been teaching 
it to us, "Father," "our Father." How 
would any other father feel toward the use 
of his own name in the language of his 
children? He would be grieved, certainly, 
if he ever heard them speaking it in tones 
of disrespect. And yet if this offense had 
been committed because the child was 
angry or thoughtless, blurting out his 
words under some strong provocation, or 

41 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

letting them slip without perceiving how 
much they meant, in such- a case any sen- 
sible father would make allowance and 
easily forgive or ignore the childish fault. 
But how must a father feel if his children 
never spoke to him at all, never spoke of 
him at all, never once named his name in 
their familiar speech ? 

We may well tremble to think how God's 
ear is still wounded by this harsh chorus of 
profanity rising from the lips of his ene- 
mies in every corner of the earth ; but are 
you sure that the Father's ear may not be 
still more cruelly wounded by this strange 
conspiracy of awkward silence which so 
often falls upon his own children when we 
ought to be speaking our Father's name? 

If we are careful not to grieve the Lord 
by any profanity of speech, we must be 
equally careful not to grieve him by our 
irreverent and ungrateful silence. "Men 
conscious of deep and real reverence,'* 
Robertson says, "are not fearful of the 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

appearance of irreverence"; and he goes 
on to show how in the days of the great 
Hebrew prophets the name of Jehovah 
used to be named devoutly and freely; a 
mighty cedar would be called a cedar to 
Jehovah; a lofty mountain a mountain of 
Jehovah; Moses was said to be beautiful 
to God. "No beauty — no greatness — no 
goodness, was conceivable except as ema- 
nating from him." It was in a later and 
more degenerate time, when the spirit of 
prophecy was dead, that the Jews came to 
think the name too holy for human lips; 
and even when reading the Scripture in the 
synagogue, if they saw those awful char- 
acters, always substituted another sound. 
They dared not say Jehovah, but offered 
the spurious reverence of an awkward si- 
lence. It would be well if all who have 
learned from Jesus to call God "our 
Father" could also learn to hallow his 
name by using it more naturally and thank- 
fully in our daily speech at home and 

43 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

among our friends. "Whatsoever ye do," 
says the apostle, "in word or deed, do all 
in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving 
thanks to God and the Father by him." 

So much for reverence when we are at 
home. But what of the reverence that we 
try to pay to the name of God when we 
gather to worship him in church? This 
first petition in the Lord's Prayer may 
fairly be taken as the divine warrant of 
the whole institution of public worship. 
The first desire of all true believers alike 
being that God 's name may be hallowed or 
honored, we all naturally make it our first 
business on the first day of the week to 
come together and unite in showing it 
honor. "God is a Spirit: and they that 
worship him must worship him in spirit 
and in truth," and the Father is seeking 
such to worship him. It is the will of God 
that we offer worship. This first petition of 
the Lord's Prayer is to be associated with 
all the public services of prayer and of 

44 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

praise. "Hallowed be thy name" — the 
meaning of every hymn that his people 
sing, and of every prayer that they offer; 
of every bended knee or bowed head; of 
that hush of silence that falls upon those 
who enter the door of a church — it is all 
an expression of our common desire that 
the name of God may be hallowed by us 
and about us. In everything that we do in 
our forms of public worship we are en- 
deavoring ourselves to serve as instruments 
for bringing about an answer to our request 
that God's name be hallowed. 

It is to be noted that this petition stands 
first of all the petitions in the Lord's 
Prayer. It is the very first thing that a 
disciple thinks of as he begins to pray ; in- 
dicating what must be our first business 
on the first day of every week — to hallow 
God's name. Nothing else is to take pre- 
cedence of that. Other things may follow. 
Before the day is over it will be right to 
offer a prayer for daily bread, but that can 

45 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

wait till later. Even the prayer for for- 
giveness of our sins comes later, and the 
prayer for deliverance from temptation 
comes later. In Christ's order earliest of 
all stands this petition that the name of 
God our Father may be hallowed. 

It reminds one of the oft-repeated decla- 
ration of the psalmist that he will make his 
worship of God the very earliest business 
of the day. "Awake, psaltery and harp," 
he cries ; ' ' 1 myself will awake early. I will 
praise thee, Lord, among the people. " " 
God, thou art my God; early will I seek 
thee." "Early," what a favorite word it 
is with him ! Naturally so for a man who 
could go on to say, as the psalmist says, 
"My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh 
longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, 
where no water is; to see thy power 
and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in 
the sanctuary." A man who felt so 
strongly on the subject would not be 
apt to be late. "Early will I seek thee." 

46 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

In another place the psalmist cries to 
God, "0 satisfy us early with thy mercy; 
that we may rejoice and be glad all our 
days. ' ' 

So in the Proverbs we hear Wisdom say- 
ing, "Those that seek me early shall find 
me. ' ' So the prophet cries to God, 7 ' ' With 
my soul have I desired thee in the night; 
yea, with my spirit within me will I seek 
thee early. ' ' And so in the Gospel story on 
that memorable first day of the week cer- 
tain women were early at the sepulcher, 
and it was they who were able to come back 
telling of the vision of the angels, and that 
the Lord was alive. All these devout and 
highly favored souls seem to have accepted 
the logic of the Lord's Prayer which puts 
this request for the hallowing of God's 
name earliest among all the petitions; not 
late, but early. 

So anyone who had learned the Lord's 
Prayer by heart would find that this 

7 Isa. 26 : 9. 

47 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

"early" is a proper word to be associated 
with all the exercises of the public worship 
of God; not late, but early. Those who 
have made an appointment with him, or 
with each other, that at some specified time 
we will unite in showing honor to his name, 
if we are really anxious that his name 
should be honored, will expect to be at the 
rendezvous on time. Of course our best 
endeavors at promptness do not always 
succeed. The common agencies of trans- 
portation cannot always be depended upon 
to live up to their schedule. Sickness and 
accident will sometimes disarrange the best 
of human plans. Once in a while in travel- 
ing you even miss your train. We could 
hardly approve a rule that locked the 
church door against every late comer, for 
it might shut out some poor publican who 
most needed to come in. Indeed you have 
known some of the very saints of God who 
because of bodily infirmity had to content 
themselves with only part of a service ; and 

48 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

the part they were hungriest for might 
sometimes be the Lord's Supper at the end, 
so they are compelled to come late. 

But making allowance for all such oc- 
casional accidents and exceptions, it is not 
putting the matter too strongly to say that 
where Christian people have agreed to 
unite at some specified time in showing 
honor to the name of our God, those who 
are really anxious that his name should be 
honored will take pains to be at the place 
of rendezvous on time. We should be most 
unwilling to form part of a belated and 
hurried procession struggling noisily 
toward their places two or three or five or 
ten minutes after time, thus confusing 
the thoughts, and hindering the worship, 
and perhaps ruffling the spirits of their 
prompter fellow-Christians who had taken 
pains enough to be in their places on time. 
The rule for catching a train is ''better ten 
minutes early than one minute late"; and 
that is a good rule for church going. "I 

49 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

myself will awake early." "Early will I 
seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, . . . 
in a dry and thirsty land, where no 
water is; to see thy power and thy glory, 
so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary." 
Yes, this is the first of all the petitions 
in the Lord's Prayer, and it prescribes 
a very resolute promptness in our public 
worship. 

But this prayer for the hallowing of 
God's name ought to be finding an answer 
in many other ways and other places be- 
sides the public services of the church, or 
even our own habits of daily speech. We 
ought to have that due sense of all God's 
mercies "that our hearts may be un- 
feignedly thankful, and that we show 
forth his praise, not only with our lips, 
but in our lives; by giving up our- 
selves to his service, and walking before 
him in holiness and righteousness all our 
days." "Hallowed by thy name," and by 
the very ordinance of baptism that sacred 

50 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

name has already been placed on almost 
every disciple. Every man or woman who 
can be called in any sense a Christian is to 
that extent a namesake of Christ, a name- 
sake of God. 

How much it means sometimes to be the 
namesake of a man; that a child should 
bear a name that has been greatly honored 
among men because of the honored father 
who bore it before him. There is no sad- 
der tragedy in this world than when such 
a child, by his own unworthiness, drags the 
honored name that he bears into the mud. 
It is a strong motive to honorable en- 
deavor, when the child is of any fineness of 
sentiment, that he has been charged with 
so sacred a responsibility that it rests with 
him to honor or to disgrace his father's 
name. 

So Christ has made us aware of a like 
responsibility as namesakes of our Father 
God. If a man have any fineness of senti- 
ment at all this must give him a very strong 

51 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

motive for honorable endeavor. "Let your 
light so shine before men." Why! that they 
may praise you for your brilliance? No; 
that is not the reason given ; that would be 
rather a petty and childish motive for a 
Christian ; but ' ' that they may see your good 
works, and may glorify your Father which 
is in heaven"; that the name of your great 
namesake may not be dishonored in you. 
It is a very searching prayer — a prayer 
that concerns itself with every single word 
and deed of our own daily life — when as 
God's namesakes we pray, "Hallowed be 
thy name." 

It concerns, too, our feeling toward our 
neighbors; for whether they know it or 
not, every one of them still bears about 
upon him, however defaced, something of 
the divine image and superscription. The 
stamp on the old coin was Caesar's, but the 
stamp on the man is God's. And when we 
pray that God 's name may be hallowed we 
are laying upon ourselves some grave re- 

52 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME 

sponsibilities as regards our treatment of 
that fellow-man. 

"Lord, teach us to pray," said the dis- 
ciples; and our Lord's teaching in the 
whole subject of prayer was by his own 
example, and once he set an example for 
the offering of this first petition that God's 
name might be hallowed. It was in those 
last days of his life, when it was growing 
clearer to him that if the corn of wheat 
was ever to bring forth much fruit it must 
fall into the ground and die. In that 
dreadful apprehension he cried, "Now is 
my soul troubled; and what shall I say? 
Father, save me from this hour: but for 
this cause came I unto this hour. Father, 
glorify thy name." That was what he 
should say. That was the petition in which 
Jesus himself could find rest from all his 
perplexities; "Father, hallowed be thy 



53 



CHAPTER ni 
Ubs fttngoom Come 

The second petition in the Lord's Prayer 
has to do with the great subject of our 
Lord's teaching — the kingdom. At the 
very outset we read how he "went about all 
Galilee, . . . preaching the gospel of the 
kingdom." We read on through the par- 
ables and find one after another telling of 
the kingdom. But what does the term 
mean? What did Jesus mean when he 
bade his disciples pray for the coming of 
this kingdom? 

Our Lord's Jewish hearers would have 
been apt to suppose that they understood 
the meaning of the prayer, for it was a 
prayer that they had long been in the habit 
of offering. And every time they offered 
it they would be thinking how their own 
people lay helpless and ashamed under the 



THY KINGDOM COME 

heathen power of Rome. To their minds 
the coming of God's kingdom would mean 
that he would in some way manifest his 
divine power to break that hated Roman 
yoke and make his people Israel once more 
an independent and powerful nation, as they 
had been a thousand years before in the 
glorious times of David and Solomon, 
with some anointed son of David a king on 
the throne, so mighty in conquest that all 
the other nations of the world must bring 
their tribute up to Jerusalem. Something 
like that was what every devout Jew had in 
mind when he prayed for the coming of the 
kingdom. Listening to Jesus, after a while 
some of them began to question whether 
he, showing, as he did, such strange power 
over men's souls, might not be the long- 
hoped-for Messiah, God's appointed king 
to deliver and rule his people Israel. At 
one time many of the common people hoped 
that this was so; and even the hostile 
rulers could not quite repress their fears 

55 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

that it might be so; that Jesus himself 
might be the king who was sent to rule over 
this long-hoped-for kingdom of God. 

This expectation that Jesus might be the 
king was rudely shaken by his crucifixion, 
but not permanently destroyed ; for it soon 
revived among his disciples in the form of 
a belief that he who had been shamefully 
crucified would speedily come again to 
reign in power and great glory. In some 
sense this hope of our Lord's second com- 
ing in power is a hope that we are all bid- 
den to cherish. But sometimes the disciples 
have read into this hope some of the worst 
errors of the old Jews — that selfish Jewish 
provincialism, that crude Jewish material- 
ism, which Jesus was always rebuking and 
correcting. We used to suppose that these 
more extreme millennarian opinions were 
characteristic of the more ignorant and 
fanatical sects. But strangely enough sim- 
ilar views have lately come to be the 
fashion among certain scholars who con- 

56 



THY KINGDOM COME 

sider themselves especially advanced. 
They do not shrink from declaring that 
our Lord himself based his own gospel on 
such Apocalyptic extravagances as you find 
in the book of Enoch. 

They will hardly persuade us. What 
Jesus had in mind when he preached the 
kingdom of God was not the triumph of an 
oriental dynasty, exalting its favorites and 
destroying its rivals. The heart of the 
Christian world knows better. The late 
Professor Bruce spoke for a sounder 
scholarship when he said "that the out- 
standing characteristics of the kingdom, as 
Jesus conceived it, were spirituality and 
universality." Men asked, "When is it com- 
ing?" and he answered: "It is now here in 
the midst of you"; "It cometh not with ob- 
servation"; "It is like a seed cast into the 
ground, growing, men know not how " ; "It 
is like the mustard seed, too small to be 
noticed, but growing up to the full measure 
of a tree"; "It is like heaven hidden in 

57 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

three measures of meal, and working 
through the mass till the whole is leav- 
ened. ' ' What is the kingdom ! You ask an 
apostle, and he answers, "It is righteous- 
ness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." 
In other words, it is essentially spiritual in 
its nature, and therefore universal in its 
operations. And whenever and wherever 
those divine qualities exist among men 
there the divine kingdom is already estab- 
lishing itself; but we are still to pray for 
its coming, because those divine qualities 
need always to be made more common 
everywhere among men than they are any- 
where yet. Righteousness and peace and 
the joy that is in the Holy Ghost are too 
rare as yet. 

Maurice has said somewhere that our 
Lord, in preaching the kingdom, was "the 
Revealer and Asserter of the divine order ; 
that he entered into conflict with the anom- 
alies which disturbed that order." "The 
divine order," meditate on that phrase. 

58 



THY KINGDOM COME 

Another has well said that 8 "Jesus em- 
ployed the phrase kingdom of God, or of 
heaven to indicate that perfect order of 
things which he was about to establish in 
which all those of every nation who should 
believe in him were to be gathered to- 
gether," and so forth. And so our Lord 
himself says in his great Parable of the 
Judgment, that when the day comes that 
shall gather all nations before the throne of 
glory — in other words, when the kingdom 
is come — the king shall say to those on the 
right, "Come, because ye fed me when 
hungry," and so forth; and to those on 
the left, "Depart, because ye did not." 
That is, when the kingdom is come visibly 
and in the largest sense, and when 
the principle of the kingdom is fully re- 
vealed, it will prove to be this simple rule 
of fairness and kindness and peace; for 
the king himself when he appears shall 

8 Thayer 's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testa- 
ment. 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

speak that out as his own will, and beyond 
question the will of the king must be always 
and everywhere the law of the kingdom. 

And really, however it be with conflicting 
schools of interpreters, the larger world 
outside has not found it impossible to get 
at Christ's meaning in this phrase. Rather 
it is a phrase that well-disposed people 
seem to delight in more and more. Perhaps 
for the reason that other kings have gone 
out of fashion we incline more to talk of the 
kingdom of God. A kingdom means au- 
thority; it means an order that must not 
be violated, laws that cannot be set aside 
even by the largest majorities; and such 
laws and such authority we must have. 

We have learned to use the same expres- 
sive word in other connections. We divide 
the whole visible universe into kingdoms — 
the mineral kingdom, and the vegetable, 
and the animal. No one would think of 
saying the animal democracy, or the vege- 
table republic; the principles that rule in 

60 



THY KINGDOM COME 

those domains are not to be passed upon 
by any noisy parliament of beasts or of 
plants ; those laws are not to be debated but 
obeyed. So Jesus has taught us that if we 
wish well to the world of mankind we must 
pray for the coming of the kingdom of God 
among men. And I venture to think that 
this parliamentary era in which you and I 
live needs more than any age that preceded 
it to dwell upon this thought and offer this 
prayer. 

But before speaking further on this point 
let us turn for a moment to the third peti- 
tion of the prayer, for the second and the 
third cannot well be held apart, "Thy will 
be done in earth, as it is in heaven. " " In 
earth, as in heaven," Jesus says, and that 
phrase "in heaven" looks back toward the 
opening address to "our Father which art 
in heaven." But where is that place 
heaven? The word means originally the 
great expanse of the sky over our heads; 
and when men supposed that the earth was 

61 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

flat and immovable, perhaps as often as 
they turned their eyes upward they felt 
sure that they were looking toward the 
exact locality of heaven. We who know 
that we rush through a black abyss of space 
on a whirling ball, would grow dizzy if we 
should attempt any such precise location of 
the throne of God. "Upward?" Which 
way is upward? Is it as we look, or as the 
antipodes look? As it is always when the 
talk is of spiritual truth, we are listening 
to the language of figure when we speak of 
the sky as the place where our Father is. 
But the old figure need lose none of its ex- 
pressiveness because of the newer astron- 
omy. For a man to look upward means as 
much now in our common thought as it 
ever meant before Copernicus was born. 
"To look up, not down," to "seek those 
things which are above"; you do not need 
an interpreter to tell you what those words 
mean. They mean a confession that there 
are some things above you, and that you 

62 



THY KINGDOM COME 

will have to climb to reach them. So they 
mean a confession of your own present 
inferiority. It is the language of humility 
and of aspiration when you talk of looking 
up. The other attitude would be of con- 
scious superiority, to look down; or of 
rivalry, to look about on a level, comparing 
ourselves either in a complacent or quar- 
relsome fashion with those who would be 
counted our equals. But the moment you 
begin to look up you have to remember that 
it is you who are down. Now Christ has 
taught us to direct our prayers upward, to 
a Father who is in heaven. Far up in the 
sky — for no eye can reach to the top of that 
altitude. To use another fine Hebrew term, 
he is the Most High God. To look toward 
the Most High, every other being must turn 
his eyes upward. The very first phrase 
of the Lord's Prayer, turning our thoughts 
upward, puts us into a mood of humility, 
and of unending aspiration. "Our Father 
which art in heaven." 

63 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

But now we return to this third petition 
that God's will may be "done in earth, as 
it is in heaven;" and do you not see the 
magnificent idealism of it, the unlimited 
discontent of it? For the very wording of 
the prayer throws us out of any possible 
complacency with such inferior doing of 
God's will as has yet been attained any- 
where on earth. Heaven, the very top of 
the sky, is a place where God 's will is done 
properly; and when our Lord imposed on 
us the habit of thinking of heaven every 
time we begin to pray, it shows that a per- 
fect doing of God's will, and nothing short 
of that, is the measure that you and I are 
to try for, if our prayer is sincere, this 
very morning. 

For, of course, if a man prays honestly 
for the doing of God's will the first place 
where he must hope for that doing of God's 
will is in himself. We pray against any 
half-hearted compromise by ourselves with 
disobedience ; as if we ourselves were to be 

64 



THY KINGDOM COME 

content to do God's will a little and stop 
with that; to serve God in one or two mat- 
ters, but for the rest serve Mammon. No, 
no ; for in our prayer we have deliberately 
set before ourselves this perfect measure of 
obedience, "as it is in heaven," at the 
summit of perfection, in the very home of 
the Most High; and nothing short of that 
will suit us for our own obeying. One of 
the old fathers 9 uses the beautiful com- 
parison that "as the sailors pulling at the 
anchor rope do not drag the anchor to 
them, but drag themselves up to the anchor ; 
so those who are offering this petition do 
not drag God's will down to the level of 
their own desire, but drag themselves up to 
the holy will of God. ' ' And as this Lord 's 
Prayer is a pattern of all true Christian 
praying, so it may show that the end of 
all our praying is not that our will should 
be done by God, but that God's will should 
be done in us. Under the light of that 

9 Clem. Alex. Strom IV, 23. 
65 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

great truth how many of the mysteries and 
perplexities of this subject disappear; 
when we remember that the final end of all 
true praying is not that our will should 
be done by God, but that God's will should 
be done in us. May the Lord himself teach 
us to pray from our hearts that God's will 
may be done in us and by us here on earth 
as it is done in heaven. 

We have already recalled our Lord's ex- 
ample as the most effective part of his 
teaching. If you took this form of words 
as a form merely it might soon have been 
forgotten or never learned; but Jesus' 
own example in prayer was what men 
could not forget. Because he was always 
crying, ' ' Abba, Father, ' ' therefore we have 
been remembering to say, "Our Father"; 
and because he prayed, "Thy will be 
done," therefore we have been learning, 
but with slow and stammering utterance, to 
pray after him, "God's will be done." 

You remember how and when Jesus of- 



THY KINGDOM COME 

fered that particular prayer. No doubt he 
was always offering it every day in his own 
heart ; but the place where he spoke it out 
loud, so that others overheard him and the 
record has come down to us, was in the 
Garden of Gethsemane — "Father, if this 
cup may not pass away from me, except I 
drink it, thy will be done." There is his 
own example for that third petition. It 
may not always be wholesome for us to try 
to anticipate our graver spiritual crises 
prematurely. In praying as in other 
things the better rule may be to take no 
thought for the morrow. Providence ap- 
points for us bright days with the Beati- 
tudes as well as dark nights in Gethsemane ; 
and while the day lasts let us rejoice in the 
light of it. But some day or night every 
man must expect to come to the place where 
for him to pray honestly for the doing of 
God 's will shall mean to follow the example 
of Christ in the Garden; and whenever 
that day comes you may well thank God 

67 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

that you have such an example as his to 
follow. 

So the perfect doing of God's will for 
which we pray ought to begin in our own 
hearts; but, of course, it ought not to end 
there; and that brings us back once more 
from the third petition to the second, with 
its broader thought of the kingdom. We 
are now ready to understand what the king- 
dom for which we pray must be ; a state of 
affairs, all the world over, among all na- 
tions and among all men, when God's will 
shall be done on earth as it is done in 
heaven. 

For our prayer is that this kingdom 
should come on earth; we need not pray 
that it may come in heaven since it is there 
now. Heaven, wherever it be located, 
means the place where God's throne stands 
now, where his rule has never been ques- 
tioned. But we pray that the kingdom may 
come also upon earth, in this rebellious and 
desolated province on the far-off edge of 



THY KINGDOM COME 

all things. That God's kingdom may come 
here is what we are to pray for, and with 
nothing short of that can we as Christians 
ever be content. 

By what means that kingdom of God is 
to be established on earth we may not 
clearly know. It might have been estab- 
lished — it is not impossible to conceive of 
it — as those devout Jews of the earlier time 
anticipated, by the wisdom and virtue and 
overwhelming personal influence of some 
noble human leader, some later and better 
son of David. It might be so, for one can 
hardly set limits to the influence that may 
be exerted by a man, if he be man enough. 
Or the kingdom might be established — yes, 
may be, I do not care to contradict it — as 
the early Christians generally supposed, by 
the visible return of Jesus in the clouds, 
thus renewing his personal influence upon 
the hearts of men. That might be the 
method. But by whatever means it may 
be brought about, the essential characteris- 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

tic of this kingdom is that men's hearts are 
to be so transformed by the spirit of Jesus 
that in all their relations to each other 
God's will shall be done in them and by 
them here on earth, as it is done in heaven. 
Without that, no matter what else happens, 
the kingdom would not come, and with 
that, no matter what else does not hap- 
pen, the kingdom would be here. That 
God's will should be done in men and 
by men and among men everywhere here 
on earth as it is in heaven, will be the 
kingdom of God, and the answer to our 
prayer. 

But what is God's will! Who will tell 
us that? We offer this petition that God's 
will may be done, but who shall show us 
what the will is ? For ' ' no man hath seen 
God at any time, ' ' and therefore what man 
can have any sure knowledge as to what 
God's will should be like? There it is that 
we come back once more to our conscious 
dependence upon Jesus. For we do know 

70 



THY KINGDOM COME 

him, and the God to whom we are praying 
is the Being whom Jesus called Father. 
And we are sure the Son is like the Father, 
which means that the Father is like the Son ; 
there is no slightest division of sentiment 
between them : their will is all one. And so 
this kingdom for which we are taught to 
pray, the disciples themselves would some- 
times speak of as the kingdom of God, and 
sometimes as the kingdom of Christ — they 
seem to use the terms indiscriminately, as 
if it mattered not which phrase they used. 
The final result — the full meaning — was the 
same either way, for the will of Christ is 
the will of God ; and what the will of Christ 
was, and is, we know. 

At least we can know if we wish to know 
it ; the means of discovering it are all here. 
This Gospel is one long declaration of the 
will of Jesus Christ as to what men ought 
to be as God's children, and what they 
ought to do, and how they ought to bear 
themselves, one toward another, as God's 

71 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

children. The will of Jesus is not hidden 
from us ; and the heart of the world begins 
to understand that all our own highest 
dreams of freedom, justice, liberty, equal- 
ity, fraternity, human blessedness, are in- 
cluded in what Jesus willed for his fellows. 
So men of all sorts are claiming Jesus as 
their own representative, the great Ee- 
former, Socialist, Emancipator, Leveler; 
whatever their favorite title for the atti- 
tude of discontent against wrong, they 
claim Jesus for that. And they do not mis- 
judge him in making such a claim. But 
what some of them still need to learn from 
Jesus is that all this freedom and justice 
and blessedness can be possible only in 
what he called the kingdom — a kingdom of 
God. No nation will ever be fit to govern 
itself freely except as its citizens are sev- 
erally learning how to obey God. We as 
freemen are not fit to make laws for each 
other until we ourselves have some sense of 
the sacred authority of the law of right- 

72 



THY KINGDOM COME 

eousness itself as established by God. Just 
as you will not have any true brotherhood 
of men except through the fatherhood of 
God, so you must not look for any true 
democracy of men except through the king- 
dom of God. Lacking that, you must expect 
that your political agitations will give you 
license, anarchy, intolerance, violence; and 
then again imperialism, the man on horse- 
back, the whole dreary circle to be gone 
through again; for political science is 
rather a dismal branch of study unless you 
can attack it in the attitude of faith, and of 
prayer for the kingdom of God. 

So we do well to speak much of the king- 
dom. Especially in this democratic age it 
is a healthy instinct which has been leading 
so many earnest people to magnify the 
thought of a kingdom, to lift our hopes 
often, above these wretched injustices and 
disorders that now curse the world, to the 
kingdom; a region somewhere above the 
reach of noisy parliaments and congresses, 

73 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

where laws are not to be debated and voted 
upon but obeyed. We do well to remember 
that the ' ' one far-off divine event to which 
the whole creation moves ' ' is nothing short 
of a kingdom of God. And day after day, 
as often as we repeat the Lord's Prayer, 
our hopes are lifted toward that region of 
high and holy and triumphant ideal. 

"Our Father which art in heaven, Hal- 
lowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. 
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in 
heaven." 



74 



CHAPTER IV, 
@ur H>ailg JBreafc 

The Lord's Prayer has begun with three 
petitions which are concerned directly with 
God, the hallowing of his name, the coming 
of his kingdom, the doing of his will. 

But now we are to study the latter part 
of the prayer which is concerned more di- 
rectly with ourselves and our own human 
needs. Here also the petitions are three in 
number, and the first of these is a prayer 
for bread. Let no reader fail to observe 
that this stands first of the three ; the other 
two prayers which have to do more directly 
with man's spiritual needs come later, but 
these primary needs of the body are at- 
tended to first. 

In saying this we do not forget that the 
whole prayer has begun by lifting our 
thoughts toward heaven and God. The be- 

75 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

ginning of all was spiritual and universal. 
' ' Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his 
righteousness." But now when the time 
comes that we may properly turn our 
thought toward those things that are neces- 
sary for ourselves, Christ allows us to 
recognize frankly the physical basis of life, 
man's daily need of bread for his body's 
hunger. 

This creature whom we call man has been 
strangely compounded of spirit and body, 
but in the order of nature the body claims 
earliest attention. "Not first that which is 
spiritual," the apostle says, "but that 
which is natural ; and afterward that which 
is spiritual." 

And Jesus allows and encourages us to 
recognize this same order even in our 
habits of daily prayer. Some of us might 
not have expected this teaching from him; 
for we remember a certain record in an 
earlier chapter of the Gospel which sounded 
as if a request for bread could hardly be 

76 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

admitted to the Lord's Prayer at all; or, 
if admitted, must creep in only as a sort 
of appendix at the end. I refer to the 
record of his own temptation in the wilder- 
ness, when after long-continued fasting he 
became aware of his own bitter hunger and 
felt the impulse to use his miraculous power 
for changing the stones of the wilderness 
to bread that he might eat. But Jesu3 
would not do this, answering rather that 
man shall not live by bread alone. The 
words might seem to argue a complete in- 
difference to all these bodily needs, whether 
his own or others. But evidently that 
would not be a right understanding of 
what our Lord said. Whatever be the 
lesson of that temptation scene, it cannot 
mean that Jesus was indifferent to men's 
bodily necessities; for here stands this 
petition first of the three, this cry for 
bread. 

And this order in the prayer is true to 
Christ's own habitual conduct. The people 

77 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

had noticed a contrast in this respect be- 
tween him and his great forerunner, John 
the Baptist; for John came neither eating 
nor drinking. John inclined to the ascetic 
ideal; he would forget, so far as possible, 
that a man ever needed to eat at all. 
John's scheme of reform was to exalt the 
spirit by the utmost possible mortification 
of the flesh. And there was a grandeur in 
such resolute self-control which the people 
felt, and to which our Lord himself after- 
wards bore witness in the strongest terms. 
But John's path was not the path which 
Jesus himself chose to walk in. The peo- 
ple themselves felt that he differed from 
his predecessor; and some of them had 
commented upon it unfavorably, saying 
that "the Son of man came eating and 
drinking." What his enemies proceeded 
to say about him in this respect was a slan- 
derous falsehood, but it was true that Jesus 
differed somewhat sharply from John ; for 
Jesus so frankly recognized the needs of 

78 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

the body, and wished that they should be 
satisfied. 

Indeed it is to be noted that Jesus was 
one whom any host would be glad to invite 
to his table; for we know that all sorts of 
hosts did so invite him, one day a publican, 
and another day a Pharisee. Nor were the 
friends in Cana afraid that his presence 
would cast any gloom over the festivities 
of a wedding feast. 

It is quite in character then, when our 
Lord was offering a model of prayer that 
should serve for all sorts and conditions of 
people, that, among all the things that a 
man might need for himself, he suggests 
that we ask first for bread. 

Can you not feel a more than human wis- 
dom in that order? Does it not help to ex- 
plain the saneness of Christian morality, as 
contrasted with that of other men who have 
felt intensely on religious subjects, a Mo- 
hammedan dervish, for example, or a Hin- 
doo Yogi f By Christian I mean, of course, 

79 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

the morality of the New Testament; not 
the more or less imperfect copies of it that 
you might find in some convent or other 
churchly modification of the New Testa- 
ment. I mean the standard of morality 
which plain men have found rising before 
them when they have been content to take 
their notions directly from this book. And 
I say that as contrasted with the standards 
of other men who show anything like the 
same spiritual earnestness, the Christian 
morality is apt to impress you as peculiarly 
sane. And the reason is that it so frankly 
recognizes these solid material facts at the 
basis of our human life. Christian moral- 
ity stands upon the earth ; it is not " up in 
the air," as the saying is. With all its 
glorious visions of the new Jerusalem it 
does not forget that a living man will need 
bread to eat. ' ' Moral ideas rule the world, ' ' 
Emerson said somewhere, "but at close 
range the senses are imperious"; Chris- 
tianity remembers that, and knows how to 

80 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

deal with life at close range. When a man 
is hungry its first thought is to have him 
fed; and it knows that a man must grow 
hungry unless he has food to eat. 

' ' Our daily bread. ' ' Commentators have 
sometimes enlarged on the modesty of this 
request. The prayer is only for bread, not 
for stalled oxen, or for fatted calves, or for 
any of the other emblems of luxury and 
excess. And it is a modest request; yet I 
cannot help thinking that the more signifi- 
cant fact is not the modesty of the request, 
but that this request should stand here at 
all. 

Our daily bread. That word "daily" 
has stirred up a good deal of discussion 
among the commentators — the Greek word, 
I mean, epiousion — for no one has been 
quite certain what the word means. The 
word has not been found in other Greek 
writings, or in the New Testament, except 
in this one verse in Matthew and the cor- 
responding verse in the Gospel of Luke. 

81 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

We have to guess its meaning from the con- 
text and the derivation. 

From its derivation it might possibly 
mean "our needful bread." You will find 
that rendering suggested in the margin of 
the Revised Version; you will also find 
there as an alternative reading, ' ' our bread 
for the coming day." Many good scholars 
incline to this latter rendering, "Give us 
to-day bread enough to last through to- 
morrow." If that be what it means, it 
would show how a man may hope to obey 
Christ's other command that we "take no 
anxious thought for to-morrow, saying, 
what shall we eat," and so forth. For 
the surest way to avoid all painful anxiety 
about to-morrow's bread is to carry the 
subject to the Lord in prayer now. 

I do not know which rendering is the 
more accurate, but practically they all 
come to much the same thing ; our familiar 
"daily" covers the whole thought well 
enough. It is a modest request, but a very 

82 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

urgent one; for it stands here first among 
all the things that we ask for ourselves, 
and it is a prayer that we expect to repeat 
every morning as long as we live : * ' Give us 
this day our daily bread. ' ' 

' * Give us, ' ' for really the bread must be 
a gift from God. The richest man in the 
world, or the poorest, has no other source of 
supply, no other ultimate source. "He 
causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and 
herb for the service of man." Whoever 
does the sowing or the reaping, yet it is 
"God that giveth the increase." Prone, 
as we all are, to a foolish pride and self- 
sufficiency, we ought to train our lips to this 
entreaty for bread as a gift from God. The 
kind Father of all must continue his bounty 
else we the children will starve. And if we 
can always remember that the food all 
comes from him as a gift, perhaps it will 
make some of us more thoughtful how we 
take the gift, and what we do with it. If 
the bread is all a gift from God, why should 

83 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

I be clutching for more than I can possibly 
eat, when some other child is left so 
hungry! Can that be the will of the Giver 
of the bread? 

"Give us this day" — "us." It does not 
say, "give me." As old Matthew Henry 
says in his commentary, "This shows that 
those who eat together are to pray to- 
gether. ' ' Everyone has felt that the word- 
ing of the Lord 's Prayer fits it wonderfully 
for the uses of a praying household. For 
one of the strongest bonds of family unity 
is this custom of sitting down together to 
eat. It would be a very poor substitute 
for a home that should leave it for each to 
devour his dinner by himself in some soli- 
tary corner, like a dog growling over his 
bone. No, the joy of the day's feast is, of 
course, that we can come together to eat it ; 
and so the Lord quietly assumes that every 
household of his disciples will wish to begin 
the day by coming together to ask for it. 
"Give us," they say. Some other form of 

Si 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

words would have been more natural if he 
had been issuing a manual for private de- 
votion. 

But when you say, "give us," are you 
going to mean only the three or four or 
eight or ten who live beneath your own roof, 
and stop with them? When we started the 
prayer by saying, "Our Father," did it 
mean that God was the Father of those 
three or four or eight or ten who make up 
your own little family group and of no 
more ! Plainly not ; it is to God the Father 
of all that we pray, and it is to that same 
God that we say, "Give us our bread." 
Surely, if we stop to think of it, we must 
know that that means more than me and 
my own house. Yes, the request has a 
modest sound, but really it is a very big 
prayer nevertheless. In the name of all the 
children we come to the Father of all and 
ask for "our bread." 

I can fancy two little hungry-looking 
urchins appearing at my door some sharp 
85 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

morning, speaking this same prayer for 
bread; and I, pitying their hunger, issue 
my orders that it be set before them, as 
much as I suppose that two such small ob- 
jects could eat. This is done, but still they 
stand waiting. And when I ask with some 
impatience what they are waiting for, is 
not this enough? they tell me that there 
are a dozen more of them at home. For 
it appears that these two, rather abler- 
bodied than the rest, were sent out as mes- 
sengers in behalf of all of them ; and they 
are afraid that these two portions fur- 
nished for them would not go round. So it 
meant more than I at iirst supposed when 
they begged, "Give us bread." 

Are there not many times more than a 
dozen other children in the background 
every time that you and I come to our 
Father and say, "We are hungry, give us 
bread"? If we are faithful to the errand 
on which we have been sent that will be a 
very big prayer. But I am afraid we of- 

86 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

ferers of this prayer have not remembered 
always how big a prayer it is; we have 
contracted that generous word "us" too 
nearly to the dimensions of the smaller 
"me." 

Perhaps the Lord has shown that he un- 
derstood the prayer more generously than 
the petitioner understood it. When I said, 
"Give us," thinking of only my small 
house, he was thinking of all those other 
children. And so in answer to my request 
he in his wise providence gave me bread 
for myself and for my house, and as much 
more as I seemed able to carry for all the 
others also. But what have I done with it 
all? 

If when those two little beggars appeared 
at my door I had known about the other 
hungry children at home, and knowing had 
loaded the two down with enough and to 
spare for themselves and the dozen others 
also; and if, going out the door an hour 
later, I had found the messengers still 

8T 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

seated on the steps endeavoring to crowd 
the whole provision into their own small 
persons, I should have something to say to 
the little gluttons; but would that be so 
very different from the spectacle on which 
God looks down as regards the distribution 
that we men have sometimes made of his 
bountiful answer to our prayer for bread? 
It should quiet some of us with a deeper 
sense of responsibility when we think how 
big a prayer you and I have offered this 
morning when we, in a world of hungry 
people, prayed to the„ Father of all, "Give 
us our bread." 

But now that our thoughts have been 
enlarged to take in all the other hungry 
children, will you notice once more that this 
first request that we are taught to make 
(for them as well as for ourselves) is for 
bread? That is to say, under Christ's sane 
leadership our Christian good will for our 
fellow-men starts out with a frank recogni- 
tion of their physical necessities. There 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

will be other things, and greater things, to 
come after. "Man shall not live by bread 
only," as Christ said. Other things come 
later ; but when a man is very hungry you 
can hardly expect to bring in these other 
things before. At close range the senses 
are imperious and will not be denied. 
When our Lord saw the hillside covered 
with a great multitude of people who had 
had nothing to eat all day, he was moved 
with great pity for them. He said that he 
was unwilling to send them away fasting. 
He ordered his disciples to go and see how 
many loaves of bread they had, and then he 
made the multitudes sit down and he fed 
them, enough and to spare. All four of the 
Gospels tell the story; we count it one of 
the greatest of our Lord's wonderful 
works; one of the clearest signs to show 
what his feeling was toward men and how 
he would wish to deal with them. And you 
find in that miracle of the loaves this same 
frank recognition of the physical basis of 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

life that we find in the prayer. It shows 
that in the order of time the needs of the 
body will sometimes take precedence of the 
higher needs of the spirit; that at close 
range the senses are imperious ; that there 
are conditions when all the other interests 
of human life will have to await the pro- 
viding of a loaf of bread. 

James, that most practical of apostles, 
spoke quite in the manner of his Master 
when he said, "If a brother or sister be 
naked, and destitute of daily food, and one 
of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be 
ye warmed and filled" — in other words, 
you speak them an edifying sermon — "not- 
withstanding ye give them not those things 
which are needful to the body; what doth 
it profit?" James shows this same sane 
and practical regard for those things that 
are needful to the body which Christ has 
taught us in the order of petitions in his 
prayer. 

We sometimes hear criticisms of the more 

90 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

practical church activities of our day on the 
ground that all these philanthropic and 
humanitarian enterprises are outside the 
church's proper sphere. I should like to 
quote an answer to such criticisms which 
came not long ago from the rector of Grace 
Church, New York City, a man very highly 
esteemed for sobriety of judgment. "The 
institutional church," he writes, "has to 
bear two reproaches. On the one side are 
the socialists with their cry that the day 
has gone by for ecclesiastical methods of 
doing good, that what is wanted is not 
charity but justice. ... On the other hand 
are those who complain that for the Lady 
Ecclesia to soil her hands with work of any 
sort is infra dignitatem, and that what is 
wanted in these religiously dead days is not 
the institutional but the inspirational 
church. To the socialists' complaint we 
answer: 'Go ahead with your scheme for 
making society perfect by legislation at the 
hands of imperfect men. If you can work 

91 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

your Utopia without the preliminary 
trouble of converting selfish people into un- 
selfish ones, do so.' . . . 

"To the inspirationists, on the other 
hand, we answer: 'Yes, you are right. 
Institutionalism of any and every sort is 
but a poor affair unless it has the breath of 
God back of it to propel, and within it to 
enliven.' But why assume that churches 
which try 'to do things' are bereft of that 
blessed possession,? Why doubt that it is 
possible for a city church to be at once in- 
spirational and institutional, alive to the 
deep things of the spirit and alive also to 
the everyday needs of man?" 

Those are wise words and worthy of 
careful consideration by all churches and 
all Christians. Every church may be, and 
ought to be, both alive to the deep things 
of the spirit, and also alive to the everyday 
needs of man. In all the churches of Christ 
his disciples are to go on offering the 
prayer which he has taught us, a prayer for 

92 



OUR DAILY BREAD 

everyday needs; and as often as we offer 
it we must try to remember the many other 
hungry children. "Our Father, give us 
this day our daily bread." 



93 



CHAPTER V 

forgive Ws ©ur 2)ebts 

We are studying now the latter part of 
the Lord 's Prayer, which has to do more di- 
rectly with ourselves and our own human 
necessities. First came our bodily necessi- 
ties, for the first of these petitions was a 
prayer for bread. But following hard upon 
that first petition comes one that springs 
out of a spiritual necessity for forgiveness. 
This prayer for forgiveness is closely 
joined by the conjunction "and" to the 
previous prayer for bread. "And for- 
give," "intimating," says Matthew Henry 
in one of his quaint comments, "that we 
must pray for daily pardon as duly as 
we pray for daily bread." What do 
those complacent individuals purpose to do 
with this prayer, who have persuaded 
themselves that they have already arrived 

94 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

at perfect holiness and need no daily 
pardon? 

When we come to this request for pardon 
for the first time it may seem that our 
Lord's own example has partly failed us. 
Among all the prayers that he offered while 
on earth we have no record of any that in- 
cluded any sort of confession of personal 
sin. Explain it how you will, that is the one 
most striking phenomenon connected with 
the life story of Jesus Christ; that he 
whose presence was always throwing other 
men — and even down to our own day con- 
tinues to throw other men — into a mood of 
personal confession of unworthiness, never 
once offered any such confession for him- 
self. "Which of you convinceth me of 
sin?" he cried to his adversaries, and no 
one has yet taken up the challenge success- 
fully. 

No, when Christ would offer us a con- 
crete example to show how we must do our 
praying for pardon, he does not bid us look 

95 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

at himself, the Master, but at a certain 
publican who had gone into the temple one 
day to pray ; and who durst not lift up his 
eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his 
breast, and said, "God be merciful to me 
a sinner." "To me a sinner." The 
parable teaches that in praying for forgive- 
ness one need not be very much afraid of 
egotism; the first person singular has a 
good right to stand* in that prayer, and the 
publican used it there. The Pharisee did 
not; he preferred to keep his confessions 
of sin in the third person. Other men are 
the sinners, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, 
"this publican"; the Pharisee was fluent 
at confessing the sins of these other men, 
and he thanked God that he himself was 
not like them. And probably such phari- 
saic confessions in the third person have 
been offered even in our day. 

A little prayer meeting was organized a 
good many years ago, at a time of spiritual 
interest, by some small boys living on Mur- 

96 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

ray Hill, New York; and on one occasion 
two of these boys had drawn into their 
meeting a youthful neighbor whom they did 
not regard as being in a hopeful state of 
grace, thinking that the meeting might do 
him good. There were only the three of 
them present that day, the two small saints 
and this small sinner. The present report 
of the meeting comes from one of the two 
saints, who is now a doctor of divinity, 
highly honored throughout the church. He 
reports that the service began properly 
enough with prayers of confession from the 
two saints; but each of them took it upon 
him to confess the other 's sins, not his own ; 
and they did this with such unmistakable 
and pointed frankness that the moment the 
second "amen" had been spoken the two 
jumped from their knees and flew at each 
other 's faces in a fistic encounter which had 
to be checked by the kindly intervention of 
the small sinner whom they had brought in 
to be converted. The children are instruct- 

97 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

ive because of their transparency. The 
human virtues and the human foibles 
show through. And here were two little 
Pharisees of the nineteenth century who 
had not yet learned the great publican les- 
son that confession, like charity, begins at 
home. We must try to learn that lesson, 
and never to let the truth slip out of our 
memory, when we are confessing sins, that 
we are to begin with our own ; that we are 
to do our confessing not as Pharisees, but 
as Christians. "God be merciful to me a 
sinner. ' ' 

And yet in the prayer it says, "our 
debts," not my debts. For in all these 
petitions of the Lord's Prayer, God's 
children are expected to be praying to- 
gether, sharing, so far as we can, each 
other's burdens. There are such things as 
common burdens of debt, or of ill desert; 
and a man of Christian temper will not be 
too careful to excuse himself from his own 
fair share in them. If the whole family be 



FOBGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

found at fault in any way, or the whole 
church or the whole community, it is fair to 
assume that some part of the blame rests 
on me, a member of the group ; and that I 
will need some of the forgiving. The 
Pharisee tried to forget that; he would 
make haste to say, "I am not as bad as the 
rest of them, thank God;" but the Chris- 
tian would say rather, ' ' Forgive us ; I am 
one of them." 

That was a deep cry of penitence which 
came from the prophet Isaiah when he saw 
the vision of the Most Holy God, and cried, 
"Woe is me! for ... I am a man of un- 
clean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a 
people of unclean lips." The prophet felt 
that his own soul was smirched by the 
black stain of his people's impurity. 

Was there ever a more truly Christian 
confession of public guilt than that which 
was offered by that great President of the 
United States who in his second inaugural 
spoke of the offense of slavery, and how 

99 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

God was giving "to both North and South 
this terrible war as the woe due to those by 
whom the offense came"? Mr. Lincoln's 
own sentiment is more clearly revealed in 
a letter which he wrote to a friend a few 
days later, in which he said that this was a 
truth which he thought needed to be told, 
"and, as whatever of humiliation there is 
in it falls most directly on myself, ' ' he says, 
"I thought others might afford for me to 
tell it." It is the language of a Christian, 
not a Pharisee ; a man who knows how to put 
his confessions of sin into the first person. 
Yes, and even our Master himself, 
though he had no sin of his own to confess, 
came very near to accepting a share of the 
responsibility for the sins of the rest of us. 
And the people felt this, all the people felt 
it. Even the guiltiest of them, when they 
looked upon Jesus, were apt to gain some 
sense of the completeness of his sympathy 
with them. One of them spoke of him long 
afterwards as a Being who was "holy, 
100 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners" ; 
but another also said of him that he "bare 
our sins in his own body on the tree." 
Even though Jesus was undefiled and could 
never ask forgiveness for any sin of his 
own, yet it has been a most precious ele- 
ment of the Christian faith that his prayer 
has been going up with ours as often as we 
make common cause in our need of pardon 
and pray God to forgive us our debts. 

It is to be noted that the word in this 
petition is "debts." In Luke's shorter 
version of the prayer the word is "sins"; 
but here in Matthew's fuller report it is 
"debts." And do we not find "debts" the 
larger, more searching word? For it will 
include the meaning of the other word. 
Every sin becomes of necessity also a debt ; 
for the sin was a withholding of some 
obedience that we owed to the divine com- 
mand, and leaves us hopelessly insolvent to 
God unless it can be forgiven. But some 
things that we had not thought of as posi- 
101 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

tive sins are debts. When a man, talking 
of his own faults, calls them sins, you might 
take that to refer only to the positively 
wicked things that this man had done ; but 
when he calls his faults debts, you cannot 
help thinking also of the many good things 
that he had failed to do. 

If some day I snatch a man's purse, 
everybody knows that to be a sin ; but sup- 
pose I had only failed to pay that man the 
money that I owe him, what is that? At 
least everybody must know that that leaves 
me in debt to him. So if some day I push 
a man into the water and he is drowned, 
that is a sin, the sin of murder; but sup- 
pose he has fallen into the water, and I, 
seeing it, would not take the trouble to help 
him out, what is that? If some day I deny 
my Lord's name or blasphemously dis- 
honor it, that is a sin. But suppose he is 
looking for some friend to confess his name 
and I hold my peace, what is that? Evi- 
dently I owe him something that I have 
102 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

not paid. This idea of debts and the pay- 
ing of them is a broader idea than that of 
merely not committing overt acts of sin. 
There are sins of omission, and the lan- 
guage of the prayer reminds us that they 
are real sins, too, and that they need God's 
forgiveness quite as much as the sins of 
positive commission. 

Indeed in Christ's Judgment Parable, 
which sheds so much light on the meaning 
of his prayer, these sins of omission are the 
only sins referred to. The wicked who 
stand on the left hand of the Judge are not 
charged with any positive wrongdoing. No 
doubt some of them had done their share 
of evil deeds, but these are not referred to 
in the trial. The good things that they had 
not done make up all the counts in that in- 
dictment. "I was an hungered, and ye gave 
me no meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave me 
no drink : . . . Inasmuch as ye did it not. ' ' 
They had left undone the things that they 
ought to have done, that was the gravest 

103 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

charge against them; that was what made 
them such miserable sinners. That was the 
great debt which needed to be forgiven. 

The daily repetition of this word debts 
ought to make our consciences more sensi- 
tive to that side of our daily obligation 
which includes the things that we ought to 
do, so that if we fail to do them there is our 
sin. We are so apt to develop a false com- 
placency because we have not been doing 
much harm, not so much harm as many 
other men; we have never killed anybody, 
we have never broken in to steal, we have 
never committed perjury against a neigh- 
bor. These accusations of positive and 
criminal wrongdoing do not ruffle our se- 
renity. "Let the galled jade wince, our 
withers are unwrung. ' ' But have we done 
anything at all ? That is the question. Or 
how much have we done of all that our 
Master put us here to do? The great bur- 
den of the world's guilt is not made up of 
its sins of commission; not at all; those 

104 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

are bad enough, but at the worst they are 
occasional and often accidental. But it is 
these lifelong, uninterrupted sins of omis- 
sion that have been heaping up that intol- 
erable burden which only the infinite good- 
ness of God can ever forgive. "Inasmuch 
as ye did it not"; and that is the kind of 
sin that presses most heavily upon our 
hearts when we come up to our Father 
praying, "Forgive us our debts." 

But we are not to drop off the rest of 
the petition, "as we forgive our debtors." 
For we have no reason to expect that God 
will forgive us unless we are forgiving, too. 

The question has often been asked how 
sin ever can be forgiven. And some, per- 
haps, would answer that it never can be. 
Every offense drags its penalty after it by 
an unfailing sequence. Retribution is an 
impregnable fact; every debt will have to 
be paid somehow ; but evidently this prayer 
breathes a better hope; we as Christians 
hope that sins may be forgiven by our 

105 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

Father, but how and why? and what 
grounds can we have for any confident as- 
surance about it? 

All who have ever sat at the table of the 
Lord would be apt to answer that our hope 
of forgiveness is in "the blood of the new 
covenant which is shed for the remission 
of sins." It is because Christ once " suf- 
fered for sins, the just for the unjust, that 
he might bring us to God." Guilty souls 
have been finding peace because they have 
felt that in some way Christ, by what he 
did and suffered, has won forgiveness for 
us, and is able to offer it to us. All Chris- 
tians may well be glad to remember those 
grounds of our confidence as often as we 
repeat the Lord's Prayer. It is because 
Christ our Saviour has taught the prayer 
to us that we can repeat so confidently this 
petition for a forgiveness of our debts. 
The prayer properly brings large beliefs 
and hopes and assurances to us for the 
reason that it came from the lips of him 

106 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

who afterwards gave his life for us on the 
cross. 

Nevertheless the wording of the prayer 
itself does not introduce any such reasons 
for hoping for God's pardon. At the time 
when our Lord was teaching his disciples 
this prayer they did not yet know how he 
must die on the cross. But here in the 
plain wording of the prayer he does give 
them another reason for hope in God's for- 
giveness, and one that they could already 
understand; "As we forgive our debtors, " 
he bids them say. If we men can forgive 
our fellow-men that is good reason for be- 
lieving that God will be able to forgive us. 
If I already know of forgiveness as an 
actual fact in this world, a principle now 
operative as between me and my debtors, 
then all those theories of invariable retri- 
bution will have to adjust themselves to 
this known fact; if I can forgive, why 
should not God? It is a most comforting 
thought. As Calvin says, "The Lord in- 

107 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

tended partly to comfort the weakness of 
our faith ; for he has added this as a sign, 
that we may be as certainly assured of re- 
mission of sins being granted us by him as 
we are certain and conscious of granting it 
to others." And Matthew Henry says that 
"If there be in us this gracious disposition 
it is wrought of God," and so "encourageth 
a hope that God will forgive us." 

Yes, but suppose there is no such gra- 
cious disposition in us; suppose that even 
when we are approaching God in prayer 
for forgiveness we are refusing to forgive. 
Why, then the prayer itself becomes an im- 
precation; we are beseeching God by our 
prayer not to forgive us our sins, since we 
forgive not. And as Calvin says, "What 
do such persons gain by their prayers but 
a heavier judgment?" 

Evidently our Lord was very much in 
earnest about this particular phrase, for it 
is the only one that he takes up again and 
explains further after the prayer was 

108 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

ended. "For if ye forgive men their tres- 
passes,' ' he says, "your heavenly Father 
will forgive you : but if ye forgive not men 
their trespasses, neither will your heavenly 
Father forgive your trespasses." At a 
later time he took up the same thought yet 
once more and gave it still further treat- 
ment in the Parable of the Unmerciful 
Servant. That servant who had been for- 
given by his master the hopeless debt of ten 
thousand talents went out and found a fel- 
low-servant who owed him a hundred 
pence, and took him by the throat, and 
would not listen to his cry for mercy, but 
cast him into prison until he should pay the 
debt. And the lord was wroth, and revoked 
his pardon, and delivered this unmerciful 
servant to the tormentors till he should pay 
all that was due. 

The parable shows that there are two 
worlds in which men live ; a world of rigid 
retribution where every debt will be ex- 
acted to the last farthing, and another 

109 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

world of mercy, forbearance, forgiveness; 
and we men can have our choice which 
world we shall live in, but we cannot live 
in both. We cannot be taking forgiveness 
from God and at the same time refusing 
forgiveness to men. And so, as St. Chrys- 
ostom says, "We ourselves have control 
over the judgment that is to be passed upon 
us. " If we can forgive and do, so will God. 
Yes, "if we can forgive" — oh, but how 
hard and impossible a condition that some- 
times becomes. How can you forgive? 
You find this petition for forgiveness re- 
solving itself into one that God will enable 
you to do some forgiving. Well, when you 
get as far as the attempting of that task 
then you find yourself walking once more 
safely in the steps of our great Example. 
Jesus might not ask forgiveness for him- 
self, but where was another like him for 
forgiving others? It was when men were 
nailing him to the cross that he prayed, 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not 
no 



FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS 

what they do." We do well to seek the 
help of that Example when we pray, "As 
we forgive our debtors, so forgive us." 

I have quoted already from the greatest 
of American state papers, that second in- 
augural, where the ruler of a nation was 
making confession of the nation 's sin ; but 
you remember that before the paper ends 
it contains another and equally Christian 
proclamation of forgiveness: "With malice 
toward none, with charity for all" — the 
world quickly learned those wonderful 
phrases by heart — "to bind up the nation's 
wounds ... to do all which may achieve 
and cherish a just and lasting peace." 
Lincoln's last legacy to his people was this 
message of mutual forgiveness. It is a 
message which we all wish to accept and 
appropriate. As we ourselves hope for the 
forgiveness of God, we must learn to do 
our share of forgiving. This is to be a 
daily prayer with us. It springs from a 
need as constant as the need of daily bread. 
111 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

"And forgive us our debts, as we forgive 
our debtors." "For if ye forgive men 
their trespasses, your heavenly Father will 
also forgive you : but if ye forgive not men 
their trespasses, neither will your Father 
forgive your trespasses." 



113 



CHAPTER VI 
Uemptation 

As the Lord's Prayer draws toward its 
close it brings us under a deep sense of 
spiritual need. For the past the need is of 
forgiveness, and so the prayer has asked 
for that. As regards the future the need 
is of deliverance, and so the prayer goes on 
to ask for that. 

''Lead us not into temptation." Many 
readers have been perplexed by this re- 
quest, and perplexed for one or the other 
of two quite different reasons. On the one 
hand some say, "How can we suppose that 
the good God ever would lead anyone into 
temptation, and therefore why ask him not 
to?" So we read in the Epistle of James, 
"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am 
tempted of God : for God cannot be tempted 
with evil, neither tempteth he any man." 

113 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

If God tempteth not any man why should 
we offer a prayer that seems to imply that 
except for the prayer, God might tempt us ! 
It is evident that this difficulty was felt al- 
most from the beginning, for more than one 
of the early fathers 10 quote another read- 
ing as sometimes given in their day, "Suf- 
fer us not to be led into temptation." But 
it takes little reflection to show that this 
difficulty goes deeper than any particular 
wording of the prayer; for it grows out 
of the fact, everywhere observed but so im- 
possible for us to explain, that moral evil 
has somehow gained entrance to a world 
under the power of a holy God; a fact 
which we can never hope to explain, but 
which everywhere forces itself on our at- 
tention. Of certain things, however, we 
can be sure; and one is that God himself 
would never tempt a man to sin. For 
tempting is not the same as leading into a 

10 Cyprian De Dom. Orat. 25 ; Aug. De Serm. Dom. IX. 
30. 

114 



TEMPTATION 

place where one might be tempted. The 
latter, God might do and often does. The 
Gospel history relates how Jesus was "led 
up of the spirit into the wilderness to be 
tempted of the devil." The tempting was 
not God's doing, but the leading was. A 
human father would not tempt his son, but 
he might send him to college in spite of the 
well-known fact that some new temptations 
will assail him there that he never met at 
home. The tempting is in no way the 
father's act, but the sending is. "Give me 
neither poverty nor riches," says the wise 
man in the Proverbs, "lest I be full, and 
deny thee ... or lest I be poor, and steal." 
The good man recognized peculiar tempta- 
tions coming from excessive wealth on the 
one side and from excessive want on the 
other; and he is wise enough to pray that 
he himself may never be led into either 
of those perilous extremes. But in the 
providence of God some men have been 
poor and other men have been rich. It is 

115 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

not then a meaningless or superfluous re- 
quest when we say, "Lead us not into temp- 
tation. ' ' 

But sometimes men have felt another 
difficulty in offering this petition. Since it 
is a well-known fact that the highest de- 
velopment of spiritual character comes so 
often through resisting temptation, how 
could it be right for us to pray that all temp- 
tation be abolished? James himself, the 
very apostle who teaches us that God never 
tempteth any man, had already declared in 
the same chapter, "Blessed is the man that 
endureth temptation: for when he is tried, 
he shall receive the crown of life." And 
Peter cries, "Beloved, think it not strange 
concerning the fiery trial" — or temptation 
— "that is to try you, . . . but rejoice"; and 
elsewhere tells his readers that the trial 
of their faith is "much more precious than 
of gold that perisheth, though it be tried 
with fire." So Jesus himself speaks his 
richest promises to those disciples who have 
116 



TEMPTATION 

continued with him in his temptations. Al- 
together the Scripture makes it very evi- 
dent, as indeed we ourselves know from our 
own observing, that this perilous experi- 
ence of temptation sometimes offers men 
the highest kind of spiritual opportunity. 
It serves as the refining fire for purifying 
the gold. Shall we not be condemning our- 
selves to perpetual spiritual immaturity, or 
else to hopeless spiritual mediocrity, if we 
beg God not to lead us into temptation? 
" Blessed is the man that endureth tempta- 
tion." 

Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! 
Why comes temptation but for man to meet 
And master and make crouch beneath his feet, 
And so be pedestaled in triumph ? Pray, 
Lead us into no such temptations, Lord! 
Yea, but, O thou whose servants are the bold, 
Lead such temptations by the head and hair, 
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight, 
That so he may do battle and have praise! u 

And our souls thrill in response to this 
martial aspiration of Browning's good 

u Browning, The Ring and the Book. 
117 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

pope, and we are almost on the point of 
praying that temptation may come, that so 
by doing battle against it we may have 
praise, or by faithfully enduring it we may 
have the promised blessedness. 

But no ; that is not the prayer that Christ 
has left for us to learn and offer. Rather 
let it be our daily request that God shall 
lead us not into temptation. Blessed is 
the man who endures it when it comes, 
but we are not to pray for it. "Lead us 
not." 

For any man who was himself asking for 
the temptation or — what is much the same 
thing — himself willfully running into temp- 
tation, is a kind of braggart; and instead 
of being strengthened by the experience is 
more likely to be overthrown by it. It is 
as if he were saying boastfully: "Try me 
against this famous tempter of yours, and 
see how easily I can put him to flight. You 
tell me of others whom he has tripped up 
and destroyed, but they are not so bold or 

118 



TEMPTATION 

so strong on their feet as I am. Try me 
and see." 

In the early days of persecution there 
came to be a kind of frenzy among some 
of the Christians; they would go and de- 
liver themselves up to the authorities and 
insist upon the honor of martyrdom, as if 
to say, ''Put me to the test, and see how 
boldly I shall pass through the fiery or- 
deal." The wiser leaders of the church 
were compelled to check this recklessness 
by threatening heavy spiritual penalties. 
Real martyrdom was the highest blessed- 
ness ; but to seek it in this way made a man 
a suicide, not a martyr. 

In the gentler conditions of life ap- 
pointed for us in these later days a man 
may show the same vainglorious spirit in 
some other way. He may pray God to send 
the temptation of sorrow and loss upon 
him, that he may show how patiently he 
can bear it. Or being of a different temper 
he may insist on forcing his own way into 

119 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

companies and associations that have 
proved morally disastrous to many of his 
neighbors. When you remonstrate with 
him, he replies easily: "No fears for me; 
I am not a baby to need to be tied always 
to some one's apron string. I can look out 
for myself. If temptations come I need a 
little exercise at resisting." 

Our Master would not encourage in us 
any such spirit of vainglory, but rather a 
mood of humility, a sense of personal 
danger, a prayer for deliverance from these 
awful incitements to sin. "Watch and 
pray, that ye enter not into temptation : the 
spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." 
And when our Lord offered that counsel 
he himself had been praying, "Let this cup 
pass from me"; for that cup had brought 
him the cruelest temptation ever suffered 
on earth; — "Let this cup pass from me." 
Though he added also, "Not my will, but 
thine, be done." 

If you turn back to the earlier scene of 
120 



TEMPTATION 

our Lord's threefold temptation in the 
wilderness you find that the first assault 
was when, being hungry, he was tempted 
to make the stones bread ; but this he would 
not do, showing how hunger or any other 
trial, when it comes in the way of God's 
providence, is not to be refused; rather a 
child of God may gain blessedness and 
strength by bravely enduring it. 

The second temptation was quite differ- 
ent from the first. In this Jesus was 
tempted to throw himself down from the 
pinnacle of the temple, which he refused to 
do; showing how the danger of falling or 
any other trial, when it does not come in the 
way of God's providence — when the man 
himself had rashly and needlessly pushed 
himself into it — will not strengthen his soul, 
and will not bring such promise of blessed- 
ness. No ; for a man to push himself into 
any such peril or temptation is not trusting 
God or serving him, but tempting him, and 
< 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." 

121 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

So the principle is that when these temp- 
tations come, as they often will, we are to 
face them patiently and fearlessly; but all 
the while our own personal desire and 
prayer to God must be, "Lead us not into 
them. ' ' To put it into everyday language, 
when God sees fit to bring us into any of 
these trials we shall do our best with his 
help to bear them manfully ; but if it were 
left for us to choose we prefer to stay out 
of them. For we have not found in our- 
selves any moral strength to spare. So, 
conscious of weakness, our own preference 
would be, "Lead us not into temptation"; 
and that is the proper prayer. "Let others 
confide as they please," says Calvin, "in 
the native abilities and powers of free will, 
which they suppose themselves to possess; 
it is enough for us to stand and be strong 
in the power of God alone." Yes, Christ 
taught us a prayer of wise humility and 
also of trustful courage, "Lead us not into 
temptation, but deliver us from evil." 

122 



TEMPTATION 

And it is to be remembered that a man in 
offering this petition does not pray for him- 
self alone. All through the Lord's Prayer 
we have been made conscious of our fellow- 
ship with other worshipers. We are 
speaking to our Father; we pray for our 
daily bread ; we ask for the forgiveness of 
our debts; and so here "Lead us not into 
temptation." We are to be thinking of all 
these other tempted souls as well as our 
own soul — and of all other souls that ever 
might be tempted — when we say, ' ' Lead us 
not." 

Evidently no man could offer any of 
these petitions honestly unless he himself 
was doing his best to bring about an an- 
swer. When we pray, ' * Give us this day our 
daily bread," it means that we are deeply 
concerned for all the other hungry mem- 
bers of the family, and are willing to do 
what we can toward getting them all fed. 
Simply to pray for them without the doing, 
simply to say, " 'Depart in peace, be ye 

123 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

warmed and filled ' ; notwithstanding ye give 
them not those things which are needful to 
the body; what doth it profit?" says the 
practical James. So when we pray for for- 
giveness for our debts we are thinking of all 
the other indebted members of the family 
who may need forgiveness as well as we, and 
in our prayer we announce in so many 
words our determination to do our part 
toward furnishing such forgiveness as they 
need. ' ' Forgive as we forgive, ' ' for we are 
going to do our part of the forgiving. 

So when we come to this awful peril of 
temptation, our prayer is that we may not 
be led into it. "We," it means all of us; 
for we are thinking of ourselves and also 
of these other imperiled souls about us, and 
praying for them all while we pray for 
ourselves. And, of course, that must mean 
a willingness and strong determination on 
our part to do whatever we ourselves can 
toward keeping them all out of temptation 
and delivering them all from evil. What 

124 



TEMPTATION 

an absurdity it would be — not to say blas- 
phemy — for a man to speak this prayer to 
God and then rise from his knees and go out 
of the church door and willfully place in 
some brother's way some stumbling-block or 
occasion to fall. No, no; "it must needs 
be that offences come ; but woe to that man 
by whom the offence cometh ! ' ' 

Temptation then is a fact in this world, 
a fact always to be taken into our calcula- 
tions. It would be a delusion (and a peril- 
ous delusion) for any of us to suppose that 
the world is soon going to be so recon- 
structed that a man will be able to take his 
journey through it, and march into the 
heavenly gates, without the trouble of meet- 
ing and overcoming temptation. No, that 
will never be. It must needs be that of- 
fenses come; but our own part as humble 
and compassionate children of God is to try 
to bring about as nearly as we can, for our- 
selves and neighbors, that condition where 
men shall no longer be tempted to sin. So 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

far as we have any power for arranging 
things, we are to make it, according to 
Gladstone's maxim, "As easy as possible 
for men to do right, and as hard as pos- 
sible for men to do wrong ' ' ; we are to take 
stumbling-blocks out of the way of unsteady 
feet, and to place all the safeguards we can 
about those tempted souls who are likely 
to fall. 

In one sense we may never hope to suc- 
ceed in this attempt; for whatever we do 
the path heavenward will always remain 
hard climbing; the broad and easy road 
along which a man can travel without effort 
will still be the road downward that leads 
away from life. Temptation and difficulty 
and peril will still do their salutary work in 
this world; "it must needs be that offences 
come; but woe to that man by whom the 
offence cometh ! " "It were better for him 
that a millstone were hanged about his neck, 
and that he were drowned in the depth of 
the sea,'" than that he — through his own 

126 



TEMPTATION 

greed, or malice, or selfish indifference — 
should cause some little one to stumble. 
This closing petition of the Lord's Prayer 
leaves us face to face with this dark and 
perplexing fact of moral evil and spiritual 
peril — a fact that no one can afford to 
treat slightingly, a fact that must often 
send a child of God to his knees in a kind 
of agony of prayer. 

For this prayer would bring us to feel 
that the saving of men's souls and charac- 
ters is the one thing most to be desired; 
and the ruin of men's souls the one thing 
most to be dreaded ; and a thing very much 
to be dreaded because the forces within 
the man and round about him, working for 
his ruin, are so terribly strong. ''For we 
wrestle not against flesh and blood," Paul 
cried, "but against principalities, against 
powers, against the rulers of the darkness 
of this world, against spiritual wickedness 
in high places. ' ' He speaks under a sense 
of impending danger, of perilous conflict. 

127 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

And with this same sense of peril Christ 
has brought us to our knees with what 
sounds almost like a cry of pain and terror, 
1 'Lead us not into temptation, but deliver 
us from evil"; or, if you will, you may 
read that last phrase, " Deliver us from 
the evil one." 

And so the prayer abruptly ends, as if 
it were intended that we rise from our 
knees with those two solemn sayings of 
Christ still ringing in our ears, " Watch ye 
and pray, lest ye enter into temptation," 
and, "Whoso shall offend one of these lit- 
tle ones, ... it were better for him that 
a millstone were hanged about his neck, and 
that he were drowned in the depth of the 
sea." "Deliver us from the evil one." 

There remains to consider a very beauti- 
ful expression with which we have been 
taught to close the Lord's Prayer, "For 
thine is the kingdom, and the power, and 
the glory, for ever. Amen." In Luke's re- 
port of the prayer these words do not occur, 

128 



TEMPTATION 

and if you turn to the Revised Version you 
find that they are absent from Matthew's 
report also. The oldest manuscripts do not 
contain them in either Gospel, but indicate 
that the prayer, as Christ taught it, ended 
with the words, ' ' Deliver us from evil. ' ' 

This additional sentence seems to have 
been at first the response made by the con- 
gregation when the prayer ended. A little 
later it was written into some of the 
copies of the Gospel itself. They form a 
beautiful and fitting response, and as such 
we do well to continue to use them, for they 
help us to remember, or else show that we 
have not forgotten, those large requests 
with which the whole prayer began; that 
God's name should be hallowed, that his 
kingdom should come, that his will should 
be done, on earth as in heaven. It was so 
that Christ taught us to pray first of all. 
And now at the end we are glad to return 
from the sense of our own human weakness 
and peril, and from the whole dark mystery 

129 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

of temptation and spiritual ruin; lifting 
our thoughts once more to God and his per- 
fect goodness, and the certain triumph of 
his cause. The end of true prayer is al- 
ways a confident hope in God. "Look up," 
cried the Lord to his disciples, "and lift 
up your heads; for your redemption 
draweth nigh. ' ' 

What though thou rulest not, 
Yet heaven and earth and hell 

Proclaim, God sitteth on the throne 
And ruleth all things well. 

"Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent 
reigneth. " " For thine is the kingdom, and 
the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. ' ' 



130 



CONCLUSION 

Hn Ibis IRame 

We have been studying the petitions of 
the Lord's Prayer; a brief prayer, but, 
brief as it is, we have found that it holds 
a world of meaning. One thing, however, 
the prayer does not hold, one word that has 
grown specially dear and familiar to us in 
our Christian worship, and that is the 
name of our Lord himself. A prayer with- 
out that name seems to us hardly Chris- 
tian. Turn to the manual of worship 
that has been most widely accepted by 
English-speaking Christians — the Book 
of Common Prayer — and look at the 
order appointed for the morning, and 
you will see that all the other prayers 
in it, with a single exception, close 
with some such phrase as "Through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord," or "This we 

131 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

beg for Jesus Christ's sake," the natural 
conclusion for Christian prayer. 

Through him the first fond prayers are said, 

Our lips of childhood frame; 
The last low whispers of our dead 

Are burdened with his name. 

But in the prayer which Jesus himself has 
taught us that name does not occur. It 
may seem a strange omission, but a later 
saying of Christ himself furnishes explana- 
tion of it. "Hitherto," he said, and this 
was at the end of his life, the evening be- 
fore he suffered, ' ' ye have asked nothing in 
my name." And why should they ask in 
his name while he was still there with them, 
still by his own presence controlling and 
indorsing their requests of the Father? It 
was after he had been taken away from 
them that these men would long to know 
that their requests still went up with that 
same indorsement as if he were with them, 
that they still carried the power of his 
name; and so he here gives them this au- 
thority. 

132 



IN HIS NAME 

But even in those earlier days while the 
Lord Jesus was with his disciples, they had 
been learning in other ways, if not in their 
prayer, that his name had great power. To 
receive even a little child "in his name" 
had large promise of reward. It was in the 
power of that "name" that they under- 
took all their strange works of healing. 
They came back one day saying to him, 
"Lord, even the devils are subject unto us 
through thy name. ' ' Indeed the fact of this 
mysterious power residing in the "name" 
became so evident that even some who were 
not true disciples at all would try to avail 
themselves of it; some to whom Christ 
would have to say at the last, "I never 
knew you"; but they would be saying to 
him, "Have we not prophesied in thy 
name? and in thy name have cast out 
devils? and in thy name done many won- 
derful works!" They had used his name. 
Even while Jesus was yet with his disciples 
they were coming to feel that it gave new 

133 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

significance to any word that they might 
speak, or any deed that they might perform, 
to say that it was "in his name." 

So it is not to be wondered at that after 
their Lord was taken from their sight these 
same men still cherished the phrase which 
already meant so much to them, and that 
they still made frequent trial of its power, 
confiding in it more and more as they found 
how much this name of Jesus would do for 
them. 

We may recall that first great scene of 
apostolic activity after the Day of Pente- 
cost, the event which first brought the new 
church to the attention of the rulers as a 
formidable power which would have to be 
reckoned with; it was the healing of the 
impotent man by the Beautiful Gate of the 
temple. Afterwards when Peter was called 
to answer for this act before the rulers, he 
said, "Be it known unto you that by the 
name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth doth this 
man stand here before you whole." And 

134 



IN HIS NAME 

that was just what Peter had said to the 
lame man himself when he took him by the 
hand, "In the name of Jesus Christ of 
Nazareth, rise up and walk. ' ' Already they 
had found a power in this name which as- 
sured their own confidence as disciples, and 
which also aroused the apprehension of 
their adversaries; for the express com- 
mand which the rulers laid upon these men 
was that they should not teach "in this 
name." 

So as one reads on through The Acts and 
the Epistles the evidence appears on almost 
every page how the name of Jesus Christ 
was coming to be magnified among those 
men. They rejoiced when they were 
"counted worthy to suffer shame for his 
name ' ' ; they were happy if they were ' ' re- 
proached for the name." Their assemblies 
were gathered "in his name"; they spoke 
of it as the "name which is above every 
name"; the name at which "every knee 
should bow"; the one "name under heaven 

135 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

given among men, whereby we must be 
saved. ' ' So every one of them that named 
that name of Christ was to "depart from 
iniquity" ; in that name they were baptized ; 
in that name they were justified. Their 
brightest hope for the world to come was 
that they should then see his face and "his 
name shall be in their foreheads." In 
short, as Paul sums it all up in his letter to 
the Colossians, * ' Whatsoever ye do in word 
or deed, do all in the name of the Lord 
Jesus. ' 

Now if the name of Christ played so 
large a part in all the thought and speech 
and action of these disciples, you do not 
wonder that it also claimed a very large 
place in their prayer. If they had learned 
to find some strange power in that name, 
even when they were dealing with their 
fellow-men, surely they would not cease to 
trust in it when they came to deal with God. 
And so it was in that comprehensive pas- 
sage which I have just quoted from the 

136 



IN HIS NAME 

Colossians, Paul ends the sentence by say- 
ing, ''Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, 
giving thanks to God and the Father by 
him." And in similar terms he writes to 
the Ephesians, "Giving thanks always for 
all things unto God and the Father in the 
name of our Lord Jesus Christ." I quote 
these familiar passages — a very few of the 
many that might be quoted — to show how, 
after our Lord's death, his disciples had 
grown into the habit of carrying his name 
with them wherever they went, and attach- 
ing it to all the interests of their lives; to 
their words of confession, their works of 
help and healing, their patient suffering of 
wrong — all was in the name of the Lord 
Jesus. 

But especially to their prayers ; for what 
Jesus on the night before his passion told 
them they had not done heretofore, here- 
after they would be always doing, always 
asking good things of the Father in his 
name. Indeed the Lord's Prayer itself, 

137 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

though it does not speak the name of Jesus, 
would now carry in their own thought — as 
it still does for us all — the sense of his 
presence. It was he who taught it to them. 
It was by reason of his encouragement that 
they were bold to call God their Father; 
it was by reason of his indorsement that 
the guiltiest of them could come boldly ask- 
ing forgiveness for their sins. So in all 
their praying — from that day to this — it 
has been characteristic of all prayer which 
would be known as Christian that it has 
been offered in the name of Jesus Christ. 
So this thing that Jesus told the disciples 
they had not done up to the time when he 
left them, since that time they have never 
ceased doing, asking all sorts of good 
things from the Father in his name. 

But now it is time to raise the question 
what it means to say that a man is doing 
deeds, or speaking words, or offering pray- 
ers in the name of Jesus Christ. Certainly 
it ought to mean something more than a 

138 



IN HIS NAME 

mere repeating of this form of words. 
Those evil-doers whom Christ said he did 
not know could claim that they had used 
that form of words, and repeated it over 
and over again: "In his name prophesy- 
ing, and in his name casting out devils, and 
in his name doing many wonderful works ' ' ; 
but that brought them no nearer to him. 
A form of words that is nothing more than 
a form, a magical incantation, has no place 
in Christian worship ; and the more sacred 
the words the worse it would be to use them 
as a form, and nothing more. 

Well then, back of the outward form, 
what does it mean when we offer our 
prayers to God in the name of Jesus I What 
has it meant from the beginning ? 

For one thing it has meant, in the faith of 
Christians generally, a new confidence that 
God will answer the prayer. Many a 
simple-minded believer could express his 
own meaning in some such way as this, "I 
myself am not worthy that God should 

139 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

listen to me for my own sake ; but when I 
speak in the name of his dear Son, who 
loved me and gave himself for me, then I 
am sure that God will listen." So the 
phrase, "In the name of Jesus," would 
mean nearly what we mean by that other 
common phrase, "For Jesus' sake." It 
means a new confidence that God will hear 
the prayer. Surely we have a right to such 
confidence. Surely Christ himself implied 
as much when in teaching his disciples this 
new form for their petitions he added, 
"Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy 
may be full." He intended to give a new 
confidence. 

Only we must never suppose that God 
our heavenly Father needed any such per- 
suasion to interest him in us ; we must not 
think so unworthily of God. Good old 
Matthew Henry urges this caution in his 
comment on this text: "When we are 
taught in prayer," he says, "to plead 
Christ's merit and intercession, it is not 

140 



IN HIS NAME 

as if all the kindness were in Christ only, 
and in God nothing but wrath and fury. 
No, . . . the Father's love and good will 
appointed Christ to be the mediator. . . . 
So let it confirm in us good thoughts of 
God." 

And while I am quoting from that 
worthy commentator, listen to one other 
word: " 'Hitherto have ye asked nothing 
in my name.' Nothing, comparatively, 
nothing to what ye might have asked. . . . 
See what a generous benefactor our Lord 
Jesus is; he gives liberally, and is so far 
from upbraiding us with the frequency and 
largeness of his gifts that he rather up- 
braids us with the seldomness and strait- 
ness of our requests. You have asked noth- 
ing in comparison of what you want, and 
what I have to give." Yes, that is true, 
too; the words mean that, and so every 
time we offer any prayer in Christ's name, 
and thereby are made to think once more of 
the great reach of his good will toward us 

141 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

and toward our neighbors, it ought always 
to affect us with a deeper sense of the piti- 
ful smallness of our own desires. It is as 
if once more we could hear him saying, as he 
said to the Twelve : i ' Is that all ? You have 
asked nothing yet — nothing to what I stand 
ready to give. Go on with your asking, ask 
more." Certainly as often as we pray in 
Christ's name it ought to encourage us to 
the asking for larger things from God. 
The new phrase means that. 

But more than tliis, when we speak in 
Christ's name (whether to God or to men), 
it means that we, if we are Christians, 
stand here now as the visible representa- 
tives of his earthly mission. The interests 
that he lived and died for on earth he has 
now, humanly speaking, left in our charge. 
We have been constituted a sort of exec- 
utors to the estate. And in discharging 
this sacred trust we necessarily speak 
and act for him. As well as we know how 
we ought to be always carrying out his 

142 



IN HIS NAME 

purpose, thus doing whatever we do in 
his name. 

Of course to our own thought the rela- 
tion is not quite that of an executor to a 
dead man's estate, for we know that our 
Lord is not dead; though our eyes cannot 
presently see him, he is still alive to us. 
But he is not present to the senses of men ; 
and in his apparent absence we have to act 
for him by some power of attorney, as it 
were. In this deep and vital sense we must 
be doing whatever we do in his name ; do- 
ing for him and in his apparent absence 
what we believe he would do for himself if 
he were visibly here. 

This should be true of all our work as 
Christians, and anyone can see how it ap- 
plies also to our prayer as Christians. 
When, by the authority vested in us, we pray 
in his name — that is, when we sign his name 
to our request — it is in the assurance that 
this is what he himself would be asking for 
if he were here. Otherwise we should be 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

violating the trust imposed in us. If, know- 
ingly, you sign Christ's name to some docu- 
ment that he if present would have refused 
to sign, you are guilty of a kind of spiritual 
forgery, and that must never be. If ever 
you feel compelled to ask God for things 
that you think Christ would not have been 
willing to ask for, then as an honest man 
offer that prayer in your own name, not in 
his. 

So this new formula of Christian prayer, 
while it encourages us to ask for larger 
things, and with stronger confidence, also 
imposes upon us a new sense of responsi- 
bility; we must deal with him honestly in 
the use of his name. 

" Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my 
name : ask, and ye shall receive. ' ' One can 
feel a tone of pleading urgency in these 
words of Christ spoken to these dearest 
friends of his. For this was his last inter- 
view with them before his passion. He 
spoke as a man will speak to those whom 

144 



IN HIS NAME 

he loves best, and when he is looking into 
their faces for the last time. I mean for the 
last time in this present earthly life; of 
course, we may still hope for later meetings 
on the other side ; but have you ever found 
that hope of a future reunion to diminish 
much the pathos of your last meeting with 
some friend here and now? It was under 
this deep emotion, looking as for the last 
time into these faces that had grown dear 
to him, that Jesus said some things to them 
that he had never said before. For one 
thing he told them that as often as they 
gathered about the table in friendly com- 
pany to eat together after he was gone, they 
must be sure to remember him. And that 
is a request which still moves the heart of 
every lover of Jesus Christ. The church 
universal still reads those words into 
the most solemn act of her worship; we 
still carve the words in the most sacred 
part of our house of prayer, "This do 
in remembrance of me." And it is a re- 

145 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

quest that no friend of Jesus would like 
to disregard. 

But then again at this same last inter- 
view Jesus made known to these same 
friends of his his desire that hereafter they 
should do their praying to God in his name. 
Apparently our Lord was earnestly desir- 
ous that his friends should treat his name 
as if it still carried great weight with God 
and with men. 

One can understand that feeling. Some 
friend of yours is going to some distant 
country where he is a stranger, but you 
yourself have been well known; and you 
give him letters of introduction to those in 
that country whose acquaintance would be 
of most value to him. "They will do the 
right thing for anyone who comes in my 
name," you say. It would grieve you a lit- 
tle if your friend should decline to use the 
tetters, seeming to disdain your introduc- 
tion, as if he had not thought your name 
worth using. So here almost the last word 

146 



IN HIS NAME 

Jesus spoke to his friends was this gener- 
ous message of introduction and indorse- 
ment. "Wherever you go," he said, "and 
whatever you need, you can use my name. ' ' 
These men did not disdain the offer of 
introduction, but from that time forward 
they considered that name of Jesus their 
one most precious asset. You can find the 
proofs of the value they put upon it all 
through the later books of the New Testa- 
ment. We have quoted a very few of the 
passages which indicate how these early 
disciples, both in their words to God and in 
their dealings with men, were eager to do 
all things in the name of the Lord Jesus. 
The question occurs whether we ourselves 
have always shown the same eagerness, 
whether our Lord has ever been grieved 
at any of us because, after he had made 
us this same offer of his name we have 
slighted the offer. "Use my name," he 
said, "tell everyone that you come from 
me." But we shook our heads and set our 

147 



73, 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 

lips. If so the fault ought not to be re- 
peated. "Hitherto have ye asked nothing 
in my name : ask, and ye shall receive, that 
your joy may be full." 

This parting message may well stand at 
the close of our study of our Lord's in- 
structions on the subject of prayer. "Lord, 
teach us to pray," said the disciple; and 
we have been following his answer to that 
request. We have found it in that personal 
example which he was always setting them 
by his own praying; we have traced it also 
through the successive sentences of that 
sacred form of words which he has left to 
guide us in our supplications. But the in- 
struction is not completed till we reach this 
parting message from the Master to his dis- 
ciples : i ' Hitherto have ye asked nothing in 
my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that 
your joy may be full." 



148 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
1 1 1 Thomson Park Orive 
Cranbeny Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



